“How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.”

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.

Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

And now that I don’t want to own anything any more and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.

Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.

You must spend money, if you wish to make money.

In everything the middle course is the best; everything in excess brings trouble.

We in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.

Every dollar that I spend, every dollar that I make.

All of the actors that have served to me as inspiration over the years have been those more associated with dramatic work who have,

If you are wise, be wise; keep what goods the gods provide you.