“Pity only on fresh objects stays, but with the tedious sight of woes decays.”

Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

Welcome, thou kind deceiver! Thou best of thieves; who, with an easy key, Dost open life, and, unperceived by us, Even steal us from ourselves.

While I am compassed round With mirth, my soul lies hid in shades of grief, Whence, like the bird of night, with half-shut eyes, She peeps, and sickens at the sight of day.

Virtue is her own reward.

Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason.

Hushed as midnight silence.

They, who would combat general authority with particular opinion, must first establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other men.

For those whom God to ruin has design’d, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.

Blown roses hold their sweetness to the last.

Long pains, with use of bearing, are half eased.

If you have lived, take thankfully the past. Make, as you can, the sweet remembrance last.

Order is the greatest grace.

An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.

Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.

For truth has such a face and such a mien, as to be loved needs only to be seen.

Pride – Lord of human kind.

In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.

Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes. As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.

I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one’s own greed.

While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises.

I love to decorate a room – from the furniture to the objects to the books.

Everything has to be clean and orderly when I sit down to write.