Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.