Quotes

1. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

2. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

3. אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי? וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי? וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתָי?

   If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

4. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

5. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

6. For a man going a thousand miles it is absolutely necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to himself: “Today I shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I shall rest and spend the night.”

7. One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

8. In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

9. But how could you live and have no story to tell?

10. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

11. What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

12. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.