Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.