"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Water deepens where it has to wait."

"What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method."

"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 drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them."

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

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

"Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you."

"A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do."

"So many times I’ve made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted."

"What I’m not changes more than what I am."

"The single sin is less of a problem than the good reasons for it."

"The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore."

"Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity."

"The tyrant puts down his own rebellion, everywhere."

"Easier to keep changing your life than to live it."

"Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one."

"God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself."

"Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer."

"Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn’t fine long when used as a hammer."

"Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden."

"On what is valuable thieves and the law agree."

"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."

"The road reaches every place, the short cut only one."

"The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety."

"Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?"

"The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us."

"If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does."