Why should your heart not dance?
Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.
Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.
Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.
Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.
To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.
I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.
The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we’re so anxious not to see.
Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.
We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.
If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn’t.
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved.