“I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.”

“I looked in my mirror and saw, not myself, but every place I'd never been.”

“What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?”

“I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.”

“He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.”

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”

“Clearly, if it is possible to have a self-regulating system that implicitly arranges its own stability, then this is of the keenest management interest.”

“How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”

“Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.”

“We are living a moment of truth in Iraq, a moment in which we have to look fair and square at disagreeable realities, in which we have to look at ourselves. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison are a kind of mirror in which we have to look at ourselves and ask: what kind of people did this? How did this become possible? Could I have done a thing like this to those people?”