"What’s thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn’t known was there."

"Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love."

"He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might."

"The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want."

"Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand."

"First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need."

"Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of."

"Water deepens where it has to wait."

"It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules."

"It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?"

"It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it."

"A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself."

"To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe."

"The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of."

"To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin."

"The new gets old much faster than the old gets older."

"Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean."

"To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you."

"I’ll buy that means also I believe it."

"Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money."

"What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing."

"A day is only a day. But a life is only a life."

"The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending."

"They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence … to productivity. And they’re happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other."

"I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window."

"I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back."

"The god of many cannot remain the true god."

"I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet."

"Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for."

"Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into."

"If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time."

"I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing."

"To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that’s on their minds, even before it’s on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a walkman so what’s going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he can’t conceal how easily he gets bored."

"I’m sitting here bored, … trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery."

"Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them."

"Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink."

"he’s so philosophical, his approach to thinking about time, and what will last."

"How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed."

"Happiness is the readiness to be happy."

"Yet sadly we feel that many of the noisiest are more interested in their indignation than in the injustice."

"He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself."

"Birds of prey don’t sing."

"I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot."

"There is no road to the land without roads."

"Path: where nothing grows."

"Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?"

"To think yourself incapable of crime is one failure of the imagination. To think yourself capable of all crimes is another."

"Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without."

"There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could."

"The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it."