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

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

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.

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

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.