Poems List

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.

There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Opportunities? They are all around us... There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.

This is the test of your manhood: How much is there left in you after you have lost everything outside of yourself?

Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our desire.

Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.

There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

We are all murderers and prostitutes --no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of work, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there -- I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

The day will come when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television -- you don't feel anything.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.