I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

Once I realized that right thinking is vital to victorious living, I got more serious about thinking about what I was thinking about, and choosing my thoughts carefully.

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

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.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.

When you love and accept yourself, when you know who really cares about you, and when you learn from your mistakes, then you stop caring about what people who don’t know you think.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

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.

Man has two great spiritual needs. One is for forgiveness. The other is for goodness.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

Everything’s intentional. It’s just filling in the dots.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

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

Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

There’s definitely going to be things that I’m not very good at, things I can improve.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

The reward of suffering is experience.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

I was in my late thirties when my eyes were opened to truth in God’s Word that showed me I wasn’t living the abundant life Jesus died for me to have. I had a very negative mindset and was miserable most of the time because of the abuse I had experienced throughout my childhood.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

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.

Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.