Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.

One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths.

Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it-so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.

Tragedy sits in sublime rapture amidst this abundance of life, suffering and delight, listening to a far-off, melancholy song which tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, Woe.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities-I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-that one endures.