Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.

I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?