A brush with death always helps us to live our lives better.

I was not I, I was nothing - and that seemed to me quite marvelous.

Fear exists until the moment when the unavoidable happens, after that we must waste none of our energy on it.

We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop.

The journey towards the top of the mountain is always longer than you think. Don't fool yourself: the moment will come where what seemed to be close to you is in fact still very far away.

When I was 40, I wrote my first book, The Pilgrimage, and I said to myself, "why did it take so long for me to write this book?" Because my dream, since I was 10 years old, was to be a writer. I said, I have to revisit my life using a metaphor, and the metaphor was basically this boy that has a dream and has to go far away to realize that his dream is close to him.

I’ve been through all this before,’ he says to his heart. “ ‘Yes, you have been through all this before,’ replies his heart. ‘But you have never been beyond it.