The past is the best prophet of the future.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

I can't help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many fucked-up ways of leaving it.

Live your life and forget your age.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we're frantic, life will be frantic. If we're peaceful, life will be peaceful. And so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

The knowledge of oneself will preserve that person from vanity.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

True spirituality has its basis in moral life, which in turn is based on contem-plation.

Time is the best killer.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

If I get married, I want to be very married.