You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.
More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.
I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
Hell is not to love anymore.
The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.
Rather than the obsession with impurity, you’d do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
A man given to vice is always an idealist.
A large number of suspects, both men and women, escaped martial law for lack of any shred of evidence against them on which a court-martial could convict. So they began setting them free in groups, according to their birth-place. But half-way, the car-load would be emptied into a ditch.
Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.
I have done no passably decent job in this world which did not at first seem to me useless – absurdly useless, useless to the point of nausea. My secret demon is called:;: What’s the use?
I don’t think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.
God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don’t know it.
When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you’re bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!
I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don’t despise it. But it can’t quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.
To be able to share in another’s joy, that is the secret of happiness.
God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.