“By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.”
“This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don t know it at the time.”
“But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”
“Intelligence is being intelligent enough to know you re not so intelligent as you intelligently once thought.”
“I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”
“Let your eyes talk, mouth listens and ear sleeps.”
“Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.”
“Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.”
“You re an unusual person, she said. Bill didn t like you, but he never likes anything different. He s so—so prosaic. Don t you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened in his outlook?”
“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it…Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind’s fullest power. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions. The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade…A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.”
“Not knowing is not a problem, not wondering is.”
“If all you know in life is that you are loved, you can press through anything.”
“Just to say I believe or I do not doubt does not mean that you understand and see. To force oneself to see and accept a thing without understanding is political and not spiritual or intellectual.”
“Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.”
“Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”
“We spend so much time creating a façade of what we want to project to the world, we almost forget what we ourselves are truly about in the process.”
“l action et l amour”