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

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

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

Listening to and understanding our inner sufferings will resolve most of the problems we encounter.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

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

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

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

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

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

Everybody has done something that we wish we didn’t say or do and wish we could take it back.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

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

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

I don’t follow all the 48 laws. Like, I’ve never crushed anyone totally.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

I don’t really get nervous that much, or if I do, only I know. It’s all inside me. I am good at hiding everything.

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 walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

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

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

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.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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.

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

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

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.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.