One must first learn to live oneself before one blames others.

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.

It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.