There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

No one but a fool is always right.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that’s because I’m doing it wrong.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

To become ‚unique,‘ the challenge is to fight the hardest battle which anyone can imagine until you reach your destination.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

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

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

Anything I do, I want to do it well.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Oh, I’ve always been very… Emotional. ‚Hypersensitive‘ is what they call it, I think.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.