About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

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

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

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

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

I want to be just a pure spiritual leader.

We all have special numbers in our lives, and 4 is that for me. It’s the day I was born. My mother’s birthday, and a lot of my friends‘ birthdays, are on the fourth; April 4 is my wedding date.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

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.

Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.

You have to be someone.

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

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

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.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

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

We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do – about what is impossible.

Man is a universe within himself.

I am 100 per cent Virgo, stubborn, over-organised, slightly abstracted from the rest of the world.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

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

I’ve experienced great things, I’ve experienced great tragedies. I’ve done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there’s more.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

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

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

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

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

What I’ve learned is that you really don’t need to be a celebrity or have money or have the paparazzi following you around to be famous.

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

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

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

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.

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

I’m so happy I discovered early how wonderful music makes me feel.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose… I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

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

I don’t think a lot of people know personally who I am.

My life is my argument.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

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.

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

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.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.