Life and Existence

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Greatness is a road that leads toward something unknown.

One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.

By losing your goal—you have lost your way, too!

By losing your goal—you have lost your way, too!

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

The future is a convenient place for dreams.

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.

Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?

Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

Folly pursues us throughout our lives, and the man whom we call wise is he whose follies are proportionate to his age and to his fortune.

When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.

I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly, and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides.