The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

The thing is to not follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is, to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.

A person’s identity… is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just once allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.

Happiness is lost by criticizing it; sorrow by accepting it.

Logic doesn’t apply to the real world.

Forget whatever should be forgotten, so that you can remember what should be remembered.

Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions,…

Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it won’t be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick two words to live by.

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can pain great small ones.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting people off. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around. Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. There is no getting around it—people are hard to live with.

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

Did it ever occur to you that there’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another?

It’s never too late for a happy childhood.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

A bird does not sing because he has an answer. / He sings because he has a song.

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You’ve crossed…

The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

Stay with the contradiction. If you stay, you will see that there is always something more than two opposing truths. The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation.

Don’t mistake writing what you know for writing about yourself.

Don’t think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. / Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. / Anything invented after…

Inspiration is for amateurs. Just show up and get to work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.

There was truth, and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.