I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

Science is but an image of the truth.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Be smarter than other people, just don’t tell them so.

If I feel anxious every time someone is staring at me, well, I can’t control what they stare at, but my reaction is, I’m just not going to go outside the house. I’m going to stay in and chill. And when I do go out, I understand what comes along with that.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

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

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.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

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

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

You can be obsessed with the bad things people say and the good things; either way, you’re obsessed with yourself, and I’m not – you can become unhinged so easily.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

When it comes to everybody else’s thing and their lane and their timing, I’m never doing anything intentional to, like, come after somebody. That will always be my biggest mistake or anybody’s biggest mistake if that’s their intention.

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

Oh, I’ve always been very… Emotional. ‚Hypersensitive‘ is what they call it, I think.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

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.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.