The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.

_For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?

The thing about taking risks is, if it’s really a risk, you really can fail. It’s only a pretend risk if you really can’t fail.

Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.

You have to develop a very thick skin.

Be quiet in your mind, quiet in your senses, and also quiet in your body. Then, when all these are quiet, don't do anything. In that state truth will reveal itself to you.

A feeling of disquiet continues to haunt me. As a youth one dreams of love; by the time one wakes, it is too late.

A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate.

I bet dying vultures have lots of awkward moments with their friends. - Guy Endore