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

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

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

To know the world, one must construct it

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.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends