One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

Never take anything for granted.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God – if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That’s what I think.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

One thing I hope I’ll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

When anger rises, think of the consequences.

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

No matter what, people grow. If you chose not to grow, you’re staying in a small box with a small mindset. People who win go outside of that box. It’s very simple when you look at it.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

There’s room for role models who make mistakes.

I’m my own worst critic, and if I don’t pull off what I think I wanted to do in my head, then I won’t be a happy girl.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

I’m a whopping 5 foot 4 inches tall. I’m not going to get any taller.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

Nothing good ever comes of violence.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Confine yourself to the present.

My body is quite tiny, but a lot of the emotions I feel are pretty explosive. They have to come out.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.

People are looking for something a little more stable; people are feeling like they need to get closer to God.

We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.

How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don’t do for us.