The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.

The trees are a thousand times taller than me, and hundreds of years older, and the rocks and leaves and plants and animals never do anything silly like kill each other or fall in love or grow up.

For something to hurt that bad, and feel so good, it's just inexplicable.

When friends asked me, Can we help? I'd say, Not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest or teleport me off this rock. I used that line from Star Wars.

Faith is to fear nothing, to stand unswayed, the power to surmount any obstacle.

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

The fact that the bond market is rallying today is a plus. If this ends up being a bear market, it will be one of the first ever that began when interest rates are down.

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.

We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.