You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.