“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Wherever people feel safe – they will be indifferent.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

There is a powerful force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.

Can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don’t change.

You can’t change other people or (some) conditions; you can change only your reactions to them.

When you love something, you get to know it. Then you feel the ownership and if it changes, you only love it as far as you know it because then you’re like, “What is this?”

I’m not the type of person that just needs to feel concrete and like nothing’s going to change. I revel in the change.

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.