I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

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

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

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

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

I think and that is all that I am.

No person is important enough to make me angry.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

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.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn’t an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There’s room for intuition.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I feel Anglo-American.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

I think I’ve developed, as many people do, this sense of, ‚Don’t say the wrong thing, or else people will point at you and laugh.‘

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

The more people I reach, the more people there are that have opinions about me. Not everyone loves me, but I have to be okay no matter what they think about me.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

It’s a funny old world.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

I’m the most stubborn person I know.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.