You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.

--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.