Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States – that is, prosperity.

We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

My mom cleaned toilets for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but she was still the strength of our family. And there are women like that all across the country – all around the world – who show that type of fortitude.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.

I’m sure a lot of people out there make mistakes.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

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

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

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

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

I continuously go further and further learning about my own limitations, my body limitation, psychological limitations. It’s a way of life for me.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

People want to tear me down, they were going to knife me anyway.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Every wall is a door.

Mentally, the only players who survive in the pros are the ones able to manage all their responsibilities. Everybody struggles in different ways.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

What one fool can understand, another can.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

If you look at my life, generally, I’ve been put in situations which were difficult and which I conquered.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I grew up where, when a door closed, a window didn’t open. The only thing I had was cracks. I’d do everything to get through those cracks – scratch, claw, bite, push, bleed. Now the opportunity is here. The door is wide open, and it’s as big as a garage.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Let the path be open to talent.

What I’ve learned is that you really don’t need to be a celebrity or have money or have the paparazzi following you around to be famous.

I didn’t consider myself a fashion designer at all at the time of punk. I was just using fashion as a way to express my resistance and to be rebellious. I came from the country, and by the time I got to London, I considered myself to be very stupid. It was my ambition to understand the world I live in.