Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.

It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.

It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

The reign of the tyrant ends with his death, and the reign of the martyr starts with it.