“Nobody wanders his or her way to a dream, and nobody achieves a dream by accident. Don't shortcut the process and risk cheating yourself out of your dream!”

“Cemetery communication: lots of people are out there, but nobody is listening.”

“If you want to be used by God, you must care about what God cares about;” 

“I cannot live without books . . .”

“Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.”

“Discernment can be described as the ability to find the root of the matter, and it relies on intuition as well as rational thought.”

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.”

“All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.”

“You are the most influential person you will talk to all day.”

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art – I no longer found sweet.

“The shape of your dreams will not hold if you believe that disbelief is the mending glue. You will only turn back to see the pieces of your dreams if you have the impossibility mindset.”

“Voidness is that which stands right in the middle between this and that. The void is all-inclusive, having no opposite--there is nothing which it excludes or opposes. It is living void, because all forms come out of it and whoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.”

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.” —Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807 [Works 10:417--18]” 

“money is not everything but it ranks right up there with oxygen”