Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

If I'm among men who don't agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself. A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively. Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it's absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.