“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.”

“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality...”

“The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.”

“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”

“Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.”

“The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching...”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.”

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,00...”

“Tragedy is like a strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire l...”

“Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.”