“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.”

“Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

“Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert — alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”