“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Nothingness haunts Being.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Your judgement judges you and defines you.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm.

I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati’s.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete’s feet don’t exist, there’s something wrong.

We must all learn a good lesson – how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world, learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.