As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

My weak spot is laziness. Oh, I have a lot of weak spots: cookies, croissants.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

I am absolutely my own biggest critic.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

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

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I’ve got Alzheimer’s.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Confine yourself to the present.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

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.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

I don’t think I get angry.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

I’m sorry my existence is not very noble or sublime.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

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

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

I am a good listener. I think that came from my schooling.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.