When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

I don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Silence is the mother of truth.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

People who want the most approval get the least and people who need approval the least get the most.

God is speaking to us. But are we listening to Him? When our conscience begins to nudge us for whatever reason, we might have this low-level misery or uneasiness about whatever it is we’ve done or we’re about to do. At times like this, it’s wise to prayerfully consider whether we’re offending God with our actions.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

I believe time wounds all heels.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

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

I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, ‚I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior’s power to bless others.‘

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.

Fame is ultimately about the cycles of desire and how to do away with them or manage them well.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough in me to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention.

A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I’m learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, ‚I can’t go to Kmart. I can’t take my kids to the haunted house.‘

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

I love being busy.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Needing to have things perfect is the surest way to immobilize yourself with frustration.