“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”

“It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.”

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“Once you label me you negate me.”

“It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.”

“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”

“Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”

“Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.”

“The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.”

“The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.”