“In happy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to find every pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire; and now, on my return from that wide world, how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back!”

The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.

If you’ve never eaten while crying you don’t know what life tastes like.

The deed is everything; the fame is nothing.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

And all must follow in my wake.

A person hears only what they understand.

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

How often do I lull my seething blood to rest, for you have never seen anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as this heart.

Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.

There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

There is nothing more important in life than giving. Tolerance is forged when people look beyond their own desires.

Everyone has been made for some particular work and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.