When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Never take anything for granted.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

I always thought it was wrong for me to take credit for the work that I did. I don’t think that anymore.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.