There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Man is by nature a political animal.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

What you are comes to you.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

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

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

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.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

I’m crepuscular.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Nature hates calculators.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

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

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.

When you’re 40, you can’t ride the fence anymore. You gotta make definite decisions about your life.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

People like to blame others. I think a person should just look at their own situation, look around them, find out what they wish to do, and seek and go and do that. And that’s it.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

The hardest thing for – not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

I am in my own head most of the time.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.