History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

Beauty is the spirit of all things, an exaltation, a psalm of life and death, of good and evil, of vileness and purity, of joy and pain, of hate and love—all of it incarnate in the object we see or hear. It is an empathy, a feeling into art or nature that we observe—all of it a singing harmony to our senses.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.”

“The mirror is my best friend because when I cry it never laughs.”

I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying.” 

“My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.

“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

“I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

What a sad business, being funny 

Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease from pain.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.

Why should I be weary when every cell of my body is bursting with life?

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety; If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.

Lovers have heartaches that can’t be cured by drugs or sleep, or games, but only by seeing their beloved.

Either give me more wine or leave me alone.

These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

 At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever flowing water of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

We cannot learn without pain.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.