“Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.”

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

Society is our extended mind and body.

Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

The present is always changing the past.

The menu is not the meal.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

If one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.

The way we choose to see the world creates the world we see.

It’s ridiculous for a woman to say that she’s not attracted to other women. That’s completely false.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

But the self-controlled man, moving among objects, with his senses under restraint, and free from both attraction and repulsion, attains peace.

I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home, I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read because he is, like, a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.

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 demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.