“half of our happiness is determined by factors other than biology. Ten percent is connected to “life circumstances” and the other 40 percent is dependent on our life decisions.

“The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to serve others as much as possible.”

“Promise people with the hope of not letting any fracture misalign you from fulfilling those promises. That gives you a recommendable brand.”

“We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.”

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

“Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it's how we behave while we're waiting.”

“A tendancy to melancholy...let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.”

“All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea!” 

“Deliver me, O Jesus, From the desire of being loved, From the desire of being extolled, From the desire of being honored, From the desire of being praised, From the desire of being preferred, From the desire of being consulted, From the desire of being approved, From the desire of being popular, From the fear of being humiliated, From the fear of being despised, From the fear of suffering rebukes, From the fear of being calumniated, From the fear of being forgotten, From the fear of being wronged, From the fear of being ridiculed, From the fear of being suspected.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”

“your own. You have probably tried to change many times and have failed to maintain the changes.”

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.”

“Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?”

“off in strata of porous rock by the leathery half-plant, half-animal little makers