“Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.”

You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction.

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.

I’m not hurt. I’m appalled.

It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.

I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.

Experience is the best teacher, and the worst experiences teach the best lessons.

The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.

You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.

It’s a luxury to pursue what makes you happy; it’s a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.

You should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.

The secret to your existence is right in front of you. It manifests itself as all those things you know you should do but are avoiding.

Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.

You don’t get to choose not to pay a price, you only get to choose which price you pay.

Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a realistic society are those with the least to offer.

You glow differently when you are actually happy.

I wonder if she understands how different she is from any other friends I’ve had, If she recognizes how many of my poems are about the way our souls entwine, If she’ll ever know how much I love her.

Who you want and who you need and sometimes two different people.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

When I arrived, at first a lot of people were like, ‘This kid is different.’

Depression looks different on everyone & you aren’t strange if your pain doesn’t match everyone else.

I always liked different things, rare things.

Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am only one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths.