When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

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.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Observe all men, thyself most.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

In the world of money and investing, you must learn to control your emotions.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

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

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

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.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

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

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 or obscured by mortal power.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough in me to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

O, had I but followed the arts!

I was so ashamed of who I was.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

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.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?