To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

I think it’s quite great to set yourself a big challenge, and then you’ve got another reason for keeping fit.

I don’t ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing ‚cos that’s just… that’s just telling yourself a lie.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

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

You have to feel confident. If you don’t, then you’re going to be hesitant and defensive, and there’ll be a lot of things working against you.

I keep working because I learn something new all the time.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

What’s done can’t be undone.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Absolutely not. I have no problem with commitment. In fact, I love having someone in my life.

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

Whenever you’re going through a tough time, generally, you become more compassionate, you become softer, you become more thoughtful, kinder. These are all spiritual qualities that will help you to align yourself with God and God consciousness rather than with a split fear-based consciousness.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

If you sit there and have that mentality of ‚triple down on what you’re good at,‘ you’re never going to grow. You’re always going to stay the same.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

A lot of people cry and complain and put their hand out and beg. It never goes well.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

I didn’t leave bodybuilding until I felt that I had gone as far as I could go. It will be the same with my film career. When I feel the time is right, I will then consider public service. I feel that the highest honor comes from serving people and your country.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Your success, or lack of success, is your responsibility. Even when you have a chain of command that you don’t like as well, its your responsibility to work with the up chain of command.

Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different teams they’ve played on, coaches they’ve played for.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

I was a bit challenged when I was younger to stay on the right path.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

Commit yourself to a mighty purpose.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.

If we live a self-directed, self-motivated, self-centered life, always needing to get our own way, then we’re going to be miserable. In fact, many times we believe it’s our problems that are making us unhappy when, in reality, it’s because we’re focused on ourselves!

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

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

I’ve learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.