Selections from Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

1. It's so much easier to get further from home than nearer that all men become travelers. 

2. Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired. 

3. What you give to a thief is stolen. 

4. There are silences harder to take back than words. 

5. Say nothing as if it were news. 

6. Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, or the one who holds on? 

7. Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to. 

8. Impatience is not wanting to understand what you don't understand. 

9. Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method. 

10. Harder to laugh at the comedy if it is about you, harder to cry at the tragedy if it isn't. 

11. Patience is not very different than courage. It just takes longer. 

12. I could explain, but then you would understand my explanation, not what I said. 

13. If the saints are perfect and unwaivering, we are forgiven for trying to imitate them. Also, if they are not. 

14. Easy to criticise yourself, harder to agree with the criticism. 

15. Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exhalt those who cannot escape their dreams because we cannot stay inside our own. 

16. Every life is allocated 100 seconds of pure genuis. They might be enough, if we could be sure which ones they were. 

17. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: then it is only distance that separate us. 

18. How much less difficult life is when you do not want anything from people. And yet you owe it to them to want something. 

19. Where I touch you lightly enough, there I am also touched. 

20. Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it implies talents greater than have yet appeared.  

21. If you reason far enough, you will come to unreasonable conclusions. 

22. The one who hates you perfectly, loves you. 

23. What you fear to believe, your children will believe. 

24. The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road. 

25. We invent a great loss to convince ourselves we have a beginning. But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight, water sliding over a dam at the back of your mind, memory, unremembering.