“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”

“Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”

“No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?… It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.”

“You don’t quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts.”

“Perhaps it is not true that “a man becomes what he dreams”; but if he does not dream, what kind of a man is he?”

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

“The way of the ruler is to make certain that, if what a minister says beforehand does not tally with what he says later, or what he says later does not tally with what he has said previously, then although he may have fulfilled his task with distinction, he is condemned to certain punishment. This is what it means to hold your subordinates responsible.”

“A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.”

“Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.”