“My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.”

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

The French have a saying that whatever excellence a man may exhibit in a public station he is very apt to be ridiculous in a private one.

There is no way that Christians, in a private capacity, can do so much to promote the work of God and advance the kingdom of Christ as by prayer.

Your storage space is your private paradise, so personalize it to the fullest.

This may be invading her privacy but I was Death, dammit. I should get some privileges

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area… the performance of the work one creates.

It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy – the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.