It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ’sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?
Tea should be taken in solitude.
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.
Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.
Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not.
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.