The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

In the evaluation of the dominant moods of any historical period it is important to hold fast to the fact that there are always islands of self-sufficient order — on farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters — where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives: as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.

Personality, too, is destiny.

These same experiences make of the sequence of life cycles a generational cycle, irrevocably binding each generation to those that gave it life and to those for whose life it is responsible. Thus, reconciling lifelong generativity and stagnation involves the elder in a review of his or her own years of active responsibility for nurturing the next generations, and also in an integration of earlier-life experiences of caring and of self-concern in relation to previous generations.