Paradise is a Black Diamond

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult. Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.