Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

All suffering has an end.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery.

Despite all this, they considered themselves fortunate, because they were together. Other families had been split up; first the men had been taken off to what were known as relocation camps, then the women and children sent to another one. In some cases it was two or three years before they were reunited.

I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom.