Jean Paul Quotes

I live in the present and in the future. Not in the past.

I worry too much about the present to worry about the future.

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

Was it fair to say I didn't know the full state of my soul?

In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

Imagination judges the future by the past, but concerns itself with the future more than with the past.

How will we experience the world a month, a year, or five years from now? Will we be even angrier, more grasping and fearful, or will some shift have occurred? This depends entirely on the tendencies we reinforce today.

I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

I require distance from the past in order to grasp the future.

What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

Doubt springs from the mind; faith is the daughter of the soul.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

It takes suffering to widen the soul.

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.

Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we "really" experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.

A state of mind is something that one assumes. It cannot be purchased, it must be created.

A weakened mind always sees everything through a black veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is dark, which is why you see such a cloudy sky.

Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.

The most important opinion you'll ever have is the one you hold of yourself.

Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.

The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.

It's very easy to become selfish and narrow-minded and see ballet as the only thing in life, but there's lots more.