Echoes

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

For in all adversity of fortune, the most unfortunate kind of misfortune is to have been happy.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, And the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

One dies twice: to cease to live is nothing, but to cease to love and to be loved is an insupportable death.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.