“Be grateful in spite of your suffering.”
“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
“How to suffer less. The amount of meaning you have depends on the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. Less meaning means less responsibility.”
“If you're going through hell, keep going.”
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”
“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
“The life of an individual is almost always tragic, but gone through in detail it has the characteristics of a comedy.”
“Somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.”
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing—the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
“Man is that being who invented the gas chambers in Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer on his lips.”
“The truth is everyone is going to hurt you; you just have to find the ones worth suffering for.”
“If true confessions are written with tears, then my tears would drown the world, as the fire in my soul would reduce it to ashes.”
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”