Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.