There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

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

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

To live is to think.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

Eyes and ears are poor witnesses to people if they have uncultured souls.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

I am not very good with relationships. With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

There’s love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we’re alone in our heads.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

Either you’re the one erasing or you’re the one being erased.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

I was becoming post-ideological.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

I’m interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.