“Humanity is moving in a circle. The progress in mechanical things of the past hundred years has proceeded at the cost of losing many other things which perhaps were much more important for it.”

With thorns in the inner world there will always be roses in the outer world, in law-able compensation.

Life is real only then, when “I am”.

It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.

One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.

Only super-efforts count.

Believe nothing, not even yourself.

You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.

To know all, it is necessary to know very little; but to know that very little, one must first know pretty much.

Love without knowledge is demonic.

Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

The only type of sexual relations possible are those with someone who is as advanced and capable as oneself.

If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt. It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.

Two things in life are infinite; the stupidity of man and the mercy of God.

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.

Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering.

Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.

Stillmatic’ is the rebirth of ‘Illmatic,’ my first debut album to come out in 1994. ‘Stillmatic’ is me coming full circle in my career and with everything, and just bringing pure hip-hop back.

It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men’s fates are in their own hands.

There are also numberless earths circling around their suns.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

We all tend to be in the same circles – people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.

Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.