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

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

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

I don’t look at my old work. I mean, they made nice books; the books were made without me, the one from last year and the one from this year. I – personally, I’m not interested in my own past. I’m only interested in today – perhaps tomorrow.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

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

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

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

I’m selfish.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I am not the humblest person in the world. I admit that.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

I’m constantly thinking.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

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.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

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

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

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

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Men are so willing to respect anything that bores them.

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.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

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

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.