Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.

They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.