“We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.”

“There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.”

“It is delightful to transport one's self into the spirit of the past, to see how a wise man has thought before us.”

“Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.”

“If we examine every stage of our lives, we find that from our first breath to our last we are under the constraint of circumstances. And yet we still possess the greatest of all freedoms, the power of developing our innermost selves in harmony with the moral order of the universe, and so winning peace of heart whatever obstacles we meet.”

“What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

“That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way as us.”