“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

Words only separate what silence brings together.

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” said Cary Grant, “until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.”

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.

“Consistency,” Wilde declared in an essay, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”