If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.

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A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

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I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.

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Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

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It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

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I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

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Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.

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To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

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It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

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If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

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