Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

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

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

No man was ever great by imitation.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.

What it’s like to be me? You know, it’s good to be me. My life is good.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

I really have no interest in myself.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

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

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

I like actors very much, but to marry one would be like marrying your brother. You look too much alike in the mirror.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

I always liked different things, rare things.

I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them – they are individual and stylish.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

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.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

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

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‚What is the scientific status of the claims?‘ ‚What social or ideological needs do they serve?‘

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

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

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

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

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?