All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

My past is everything I failed to be.

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.

When our consciousness is quiet, the waves of thought cease and we see clearly enough to relate back to our spirit. we connect with who we really are.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.

A black face, run-down shoes and elbow-out make-up give me a place to hide. The real Bert Williams is crouched deep down inside the coon who sings the songs and tells the stories.

If I can change than anyone can change. I promise you that.

Just stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far. I will find you!

I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep.

Call me crazy - I love elk meat!