No, the secret is that there's no reward, and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. Furthermore, we have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.

— Sándor Márai

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.

— Sándor Márai

Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do.

— Sándor Márai

There are worse things than suffering and death... it is worse to lose one's self-respect.

— Sándor Márai

There is this question of otherness…. So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of danger, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘different’, and if, quite aside from opinions and convictions, they share similar natures at the deepest level.

— Sándor Márai

Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

— Sándor Márai

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.

— Sándor Márai

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.

— Sándor Márai

أن تعيش يعني أحياناً أن تنتظر

— Sándor Márai

لا شئ أخطر من رجل لا يخضع للطاغية

— Sándor Márai