Quotes

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To live is nothing more than to come here to die, to be what we were before being born, but with apprenticeship, experience, knowledge of cause, and perhaps with will.
To be alive at all is to have scars.

The Winter of Our Discontent
It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
That he not busy being born is busy dying.
Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.
The longer you live, the better you get.
There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

Chronicles
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

The Days of Abandonment
Power and machinery, money and goods are useful only as they set us free to live.

1923. My Life and Work (cowritten with Samuel Crowther; 1922)
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn't that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays