Whoever gives advice to the sick gains a sense of superiority over them, no matter whether his advice is accepted or rejected. That is why sick people who are sensitive and proud hate their advisors even more than their illnesses.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.

What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!--And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God.