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

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

It’s dangerous to read the Internet about yourself when you’re me. Or when you’re anyone in the public eye.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

Life is a song to me.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

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

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

I write all my sermons.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

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.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

We are wiser than we know.

There are many things that happen every day that we could murmur about if we let ourselves go there. But they really aren’t worth the effort it takes to get upset and gripe about it.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.