“Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.”

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.

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.

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.

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

The love be fake, but the obsession be real.

Vulnerability is hard – faking it forever is harder.

If you realize that a lot of people are fake in your life, make no time to declutter yourself.

Don’t support the phonies, support the real.

The worst crime is faking it.

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.

I like writing about things that aren’t real.