A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.