Truth can be hard to accept, but not as painful as lying to yourself.

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.

Sleep that masters all.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

It cannot be your duty to do anything that is beyond your reach or your strength at the moment. It cannot be your duty to do anything that sacrifices your own integrity or your own spiritual development.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.

I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.

I have met men who are habitual liars. They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie. Their sensitivity to sin has been almost completely deadened.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: never lie to yourself.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.