I’m constantly thinking.

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

To the people I forgot, you weren’t on my mind for some reason and you probably don’t deserve any thanks anyway.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

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

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

I owe my solitude to other people.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

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

Littera scripta manet – ‚The written word will remain‘. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

My lectures, based on Islamic teachings, were on various subjects. Some of the titles were, ‚The Intoxication of Life,‘ ‚The Purpose of Life,‘ ‚The Real Cause of Man’s Distress,‘ ‚The Journey to the Goal in Life,‘ and, one of my favorites, ‚The Heart of Man.‘ They contained important insights that spoke to something deep inside me.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

I’m selfish.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

I made my fair share of mistakes.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself.

Man is a universe within himself.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

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

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough in me to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

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.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

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