It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

I don’t think I will ever be content. I am somebody who is always hungry.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

When you are angry or frustrated, what comes out? Whatever it is, it’s a good indication of what you’re made of.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

My head’s never really quiet. The only time I can get it to turn off is if I watch ‚CSI‘ or ‚Law & Order,‘ where I have to follow the crime. If I can’t turn my head off during that, I know I’ve really got a problem.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

I’m not talent. Not considered ‚talent‘ by Lifetime. I’d like to say I’m their savior, but that would be cocky.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

Money does not change people, people change.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

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

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

Once you begin to fall off the track and believe you breathe different air to everyone else, you’re doomed; you’re finished.

I am just one human being.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Knowledge is power.

You’re not going to scare me into being somebody I don’t want to be.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‚be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough‘ are not true. They are fairy tales.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

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.

I don’t make people bend over backwards, and I don’t like that in people. I am definitely no diva.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

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

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

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.

Character is power.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?