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

Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

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

To kids, I’ve always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough – I box and do karate – but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.

Be content to seem what you really are.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

I work very hard, but when God opens that door for you – when life opens that door for you, I should say – I think it’s important to be giving, to return the love back.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

I was raised to be independent.

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

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.

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

If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don’t want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

I’m not perfect.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Man is a universe within himself.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

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

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’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

If you’re going to be a winner in life, you have to constantly go beyond your best.

Proud 2 Pay – that’s something that distinguishes me, that’s something that defines me, and we’re going to keep that going.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

I came up from a difficult background.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn’t bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn’t have any brains. I didn’t know what I was doing there. That’s why I became an actor.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I’m sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

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.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

Libraries raised me.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

My moms always told me, ‚How long you gonna play the victim?‘ I can say I’m mad and I hate everything, but nothing really changes until I change myself.