We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.

We shall not pretend that life is all beauty; we shall, as tragic poets always do, start with evil, and only then show that the noblest response to evil is not flight from it but the courage to face it.

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by love for something outside ourselves.

A man may take to drink on account of his wife, but he ought never to take to drink on account of his wife's husband.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.

We are always dying. From the moment we are born, we begin the process of dying. We do not know how long we shall live—how many years or months or days.

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet one cannot stop from living in the world. This is the paradox of consciousness itself—that we become most fully alive precisely through our capacity to suffer.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The great majority of us are not in a position in life to choose our work in the sense of selecting a particular job. We find ourselves in a particular situation, born into a particular family, in a particular town, with particular talents and disabilities. And our duty is to make the best of it.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is an affront.

The more you own, the more it owns you. We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of how to live simply can save us.

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he would be none the better for the drinking; whereas, if he takes to reading, he will become wise.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. The apparent leisureliness of natural processes conceals an efficiency that frantic human activity can never match.

The more you own, the more it owns you.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through love and beauty and truth.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in all those thoughts. We think too much and feel too little. We have lost our minds and forgotten our hearts.

To be entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. The first principle for the relations between States should be loyalty to natural obligations of human beings, not to the state, whenever these conflict. A man who truly believes in an ordered society must believe in the equality of human rights.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our own thoughts.

We are not the measure of all things. There is much in the world that is indifferent to human purposes, and this indifference is a kind of freedom—for us and for reality itself.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through the bars of understanding something larger than ourselves.

The mind is in its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he ought to take to work on account of it. Work is the cure, not the cause of the trouble.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.