Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

To know the world, one must construct it