“In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.”

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

Most men are not wicked, They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.

I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.

The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.

The learned man’s life itself shines as the message for mankind.

The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.

All men die. You may say: ‘Is that encouraging?’ Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.

Anytime you’re with somebody, you become a reflection of that person. I believe the first five years of our relationship was me grooming her, getting her tough and getting her ready for all of this and how to deal with it. The last was just her being a strong Black woman who has her man’s back.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

College education gives you the chance to earn money and live thereupon. But, umless it destroys certain illusions that are nourished by the common level of mankind, your lives will not be happy.