Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Commit yourself to a mighty purpose.

Everybody likes a compliment.

I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.

In my next incarnation, I want to be a writer.

I want to be like Bruce Springsteen or something, making songs that are relevant.

Fear is exciting for me.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student.

Imagination decides everything.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

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

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes… but I’m not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers… I want to show them that there’s so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

Your energy, your spirit are important considerations. Feeling petty and frustrated can have reverberating consequences for your ability to think strategically and reach your goals.

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

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

It isn’t sufficient just to want – you’ve got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

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

I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event.

A lot of times, people feel that if they forgive the person who hurt them, then they will continue to take advantage of them or not take responsibility for what they did wrong.

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

I never hold a grudge.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.