Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

Anyone who takes the risk of leaving God for a while, risks his life in eternity.

It's great for the people who supported me early on to see the success I'm enjoying.

I'm a charming coward; I fight with words.

I do not know when it was, nor where it was, nor how young I may have been, but I can recall. . . a sudden feeling of happiness at hearing the voice of the pines.

Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

simplicity is the best sophistication

Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water.

I just have never seen anyone build anything significant in any field without having a deep and detailed sense of what they are building on.

If you don't decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing.