My big fish must be somewhere.

If something is wrong, fix it now. But train yourself not to worry, worry fixes nothing.

Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Much terror in religion is not the will of god, it is created by power hungry clerics who thirst for absolute power and claim it for god. God does not seek power, he is already powerful.

Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.

I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

The weeping voices rise straight up and strike the clouds. A passer-by at the roadside asks a conscript why, The conscript answers only that drafting happens often.

Static in my head, the reflected sound of everything, tried to go to where it led, but it didn't lead to anything.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

The role of the scholar is to destroy chimeras, that of the statesman is to make use of them.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.