We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

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.

Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.