We started by asking what’s wrong with the world, and we ended up discovering what’s right with it.
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, bu
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. . . . In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. . . . [T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
A working class hero is something to be.
I can always look up at the cosmos and marvel, no matter what happens. And when I look up at it, I feel as though my problems are small. I don't know why, but it always makes me feel better.