Márai Sándor

All the world can want from you is a bargain and a half-solution. What matters is what you have contracted with yourself and your character. There is no bargain in this contract.

Life takes from a character a more cruel interest than usurers. You have to pay for everything, for independence, for pleasure, for physical health, but most of all you have to pay for the contract you have made with your character and your work. You can never say to this prisoner, "My head hurts." Or, "I'm in the mood for something else." It is easier for a galley slave than for one who has contracted his character to work.

There are two ways of sinning against the body: by debauchery or by cowardly, vain, and offended asceticism. It can bear neither and responds defiantly and fatally to both insults. The flesh can only stand honesty.

Things are not just in themselves: they have a perspective. Therefore, never say of a phenomenon: "such or like" - only say: "from this and this perspective it looks like this."

Admitting that a man can't help. There is no woman and there is no friend. Accepting that maybe you don't need help: this despair, this hopelessness, these momentary solutions, this eternal insolubility of all that is human, is the very condition for remaining human and expressing yourself in the world in a human way.

So the real experience for man is first and foremost this: to know himself. To know the world is interesting, useful, delightful, frightening, or instructive; to know oneself is the greatest journey, the most frightening discovery, and the most instructive encounter. To go to Rome or the North Pole is not as interesting as to learn something real about our character, that is, about the true nature of our inclinations, our relationship to the world, to good and evil, to people, to passions. When my intellect was mature enough to do that, that was all I was looking for in life.

The value of life can only be given by the service we give to the cause of the people. This may sound a bit harsh and general, but it is the only truth I have come to know with all its consequences. No one can sit in the flowery meadow like Ferdinand the bull, and smell the beautiful flowers with impunity. You are a man, therefore you must live like a man and among men.

You live like a human being if you live fairly. If at the bottom of everything you do and say is the intention: not to harm people. If you try - without flash or vanity - to help people. Sometimes just by not being silent about simple truths. Sometimes just by not telling what others lie about. Sometimes just by not saying yes when everyone is shouting, "Yes, yes!" A lifetime of consistently not agreeing with what people lie about is greater heroism than occasionally protesting it loudly and chest-beating.

On your deathbed, you will rest easy only if you have served justice every day, with all your consciousness. Sometimes the truth is very simple and petty. But don't be picky. That is the value of life.