I often wake up in the night, and I like to have something to think about.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

The question is not, ‚Do you have a problem?‘ The question is, ‚Does the problem have you?‘

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

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

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

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.

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.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

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

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Either you’re the one erasing or you’re the one being erased.

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

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

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

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

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

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

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

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

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.