When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

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.

False leaders create followers by lying.

I’m not perfect. And who knows how many times I’ve fallen short. We all fall short. That’s the amazing thing about the grace of God.

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.

...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.

The heights by great men reached and kept Where not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.

Here the people could stand it no longer and complained of the long voyage; but the Admiral cheered them as best he could, holding out good hope of the advantages they would have.

It is frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

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

We know how to speak many falsehoods which resemble real things, but we know, when we will, how to speak true things.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.