I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

In the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I worked with someone who told me they’d never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

Man is a universe within himself.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

I’d go from film to film and almost detach from one world and jump in another. I was living as these people and not having a self. I didn’t know who I was. And things just get really dark.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

I’ve got a very interesting background.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

Single life is so overrated.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

I’m not who people expect me to be. I’m not Henry Kissinger.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

I’m not lesbian; I’m not bisexual; I’m not straight. I’m just curious.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.