Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.
Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
Right attitudes produces right action.
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
One man doesn’t believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!
If there is no God, then I am God.
Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
If God is dead, everything is allowed.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself.
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.