“One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

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 deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

Sometimes your prayers aren’t answered because you’re worth more than you’re asking for.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

Whatever has you afraid, angry, intimidated or frustrated tonight – take it to our all-powerful and all-capable God. He has the answer.

There’s an answer, if you reach into your soul, and the sorrow that you know will melt away.

When people say, ‘She’s got everything’, I’ve got one answer – I haven’t had tomorrow.

Won’t someone please answer my prayers before I’m old and gray. I’ve been lonely too long and all my family thinks I’m gay.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.