Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

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 in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

Next to God we are nothing. To God we are Everything.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I’m a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I’m even afraid of it – it’s a learned affectation and it’s just stuck on me like decals. Now I pray for humility because that comes from inside out.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

In every parting there is an image of death.

I’ve never seen myself as a star. I never call myself a celebrity or a superstar, whatever.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

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.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

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

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

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

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

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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

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

The pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

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