At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

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

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

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.