I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

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You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.

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the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

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I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

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The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

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Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.

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When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seem to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.

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You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.

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Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.

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I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.

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