The Three Sisters

man must have faith, or must search for a faith

Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial

gifted in the direction of thinking on an exalted plane, but, tell me, why do we aim so low in real life?

sufficiently refined, or delicate, or polite

you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you, and you’re a stranger . . . and a lonely stranger.

it’s better to be an ox, or just a horse, so long as it can work, than a young woman who wakes up at twelve o’clock, has her coffee in bed, and then spends two hours dressing

There can be no happiness for us, it only exists in our wishes.

After two or three hundred years, after a thousand—the actual time doesn’t matter—a new and happy age will begin. We, of course, shall not take part in it, but we live and work and even suffer to-day that it should come. We create it—and in that one object is our destiny, if you like, our happiness

And in a thousand years’ time, people will still be sighing: “Life is hard!”—and at the same time they’ll be just as afraid of death, and unwilling to meet it, as we are.

“The chief thing about each life is its pattern. Whoever loses his pattern is lost himself”