A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

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.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

I don’t follow all the 48 laws. Like, I’ve never crushed anyone totally.

To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions.

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?

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‚Ego‘.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

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

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

Nobody knows me.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

I’m selfish.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

I’m aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

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

I get naturally uncomfortable when I’m put under a magnifying glass.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

The unexamined life is not worth living.