When you love and accept yourself, when you know who really cares about you, and when you learn from your mistakes, then you stop caring about what people who don’t know you think.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

I don’t have any regrets. I made all my own decisions.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.

If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’m nobody, who are you?

Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn’t feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.

When you face a ‚performance‘ that might provoke the ‚I’m scared‘ response, choose love and approach your opportunity as a chance to dance with God. It’s more fun than ‚Dancing with the Stars!‘

I couldn’t ever go back home without being something. I probably would never have gone back home. That was definitely a big motivation. To get back home, and not empty-handed.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

I want the world to see my body.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

There are certain things that bother me and certain things that don’t. Personal attacks on me? I think I’m just so used to it.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

One thing I hope I’ll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

When granted many years of life, growing old in age is natural, but growing old with grace is a choice. Growing older with grace is possible for all who will set their hearts and minds on the Giver of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

A daily portion is really all we need. We do not need tomorrow’s supply, for that day has not yet dawned, and its needs are still unborn.

Forgiveness is not a feeling – it’s a decision we make because we want to do what’s right before God. It’s a quality decision that won’t be easy and it may take time to get through the process, depending on the severity of the offense.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what’s mine.

I never ask anyone else’s opinion. They don’t count.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn’t have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

I’m just like you – I want to be a good human being. I’m doing my best, and I’m working at it. And I’m trying to be a Christian. I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‚I’m a Christian.‘ I always think, ‚Already? You’ve already got it?‘ I’m working at it. And at my age, I’ll still be working at it at 96.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

What interests me in life is curiosity, challenges, the good fight with its victories and defeats.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

One of the things I’ve never been accused of is not caring about people.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.

I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.