Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Concentration

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important

Faith

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

Frustration

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Indolence

The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.

Life and Living

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Marriage

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

Mystics and Mysticism

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

Personality

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Possibilities

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

Purity

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Saints

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

Sorrow

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic -- if it is pulled out I shall die.

Tyranny

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.