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

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Desire is the essence of a man.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

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.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

I tend to overthink things. I’m not the guy who screams ‚This is a world smash!‘ when I finish a song.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

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

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

My friends, there are no friends.

I’m perpetually lonely.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

I owe my solitude to other people.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

I was a thug.

I saw a picture of myself when I came out of the hospital. I didn’t recognize myself.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

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

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

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

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

It’s only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I’m skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I’m big, when I was big, I never thought about it.

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.

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

I was so ashamed of who I was.

I never looked at my mantel and envisioned an MVP trophy sitting there. This is pretty crazy.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

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.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.