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

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I’m an idiot.

I kinda live where I find myself.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

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

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

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

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

I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

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

I go to all these photo shoots, and each time I figure out something new about myself and what I want to wear.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

You don’t sign up for a divorce when you get married. It’s very painful. But it’s taught me a great deal about myself.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

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.

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.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

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.

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

‚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.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

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

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

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

You have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity.

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

The ‚soul‘ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.