“Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.”

“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”

“Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.”

“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.”

“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.”

“Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?”

“The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.”