By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.

I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

That I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.

Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.