To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
To become capable, one must have faith in oneself.
Religion can be condensed in a single phrase: total freedom to be oneself.
Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.
To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence.
Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man's power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn't got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
To harm another is to harm oneself
To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
The point is that only one thing matters in this world, to prepare oneself for death. One can try to be as comfortable as possible until one dies. . . Because being comfortable does not have any meaning either. It just does not. Everything is only a big meaninglessness that one must bear.
The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.
How sweet is life, can we but choose with whom to live it: to live for oneself is no life.
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention.
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.
Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.
The Christian Sunday should be a festival, gathering up all the life of the week and offering it to God in worship and then spending the day in a way which most truly promotes joy and happiness and refreshment for oneself and for other people.
Now, is it possible not to be hurt at all? Because the consequences of being hurt are the building of a wall around oneself, withdrawing in one's relationship with others in order not to be hurt more. In that there is fear and a gradual isolation. Now, we are asking: Is it possible not only to be free of past hurts but also never to be hurt again?
