One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences – isolation, ostracism, etc.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

The people in my songs are all me.

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.‘

The unexamined life is not worth living.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

I’m sick of giving creeps money off my soul.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking lately about how boring I am. When I do get time to myself, I watch TV.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I’d like to be the last person alive in the world! Yes, I’d like to know what happens.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

I can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

Nobody knows me.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

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.