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.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

O, had I but followed the arts!

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

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

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

The world can criticize me, but l can always criticize it back.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

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.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

Know that any and all thoughts that you have regarding your own skills, interests, and inclinations are valid. To reinforce the validity of your thoughts, keep them private. Tell yourself that they’re between you and God.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

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

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

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

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

It is important to remember yourself.

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.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

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

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

There are a lot of things I never did, because I believe in watching those true Hollywood stories and I see how easy it is to lose track of your life.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

When I was married, I definitely went through a lying period.