There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

I get naturally uncomfortable when I’m put under a magnifying glass.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

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

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

There’s love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we’re alone in our heads.

I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don’t recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Man is a universe within himself.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

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

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

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.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

To live is to think.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

You should never give up your inner self.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.