Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

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

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

I’m constantly thinking.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

The buck stops here!

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

I’m only going to stand before God and give an account for my life, not for somebody else’s life. If I have a bad attitude, then I need to say there’s no point in me blaming you for what’s wrong in my life.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Political courage is not political suicide.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

At the end of the day, when it comes time to make that decision, as president, all you have to guide you are your values, and your vision, and the life experiences that make you who you are.

I always wanted to do things right and represent myself as somebody that took the art serious and someone that took the business serious also, so I had time to weigh the options and figure it out and do my best to create the situation that was ideal.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

I’m selfish.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

Solutions are not the answer.

If it wasn’t for the fun and money, I really don’t know why I’d bother.

It’s not easy being young. It’s hard to know what to do.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

As I have done in every election since I started voting so many years ago, I always like to take my time and examine the two candidates, see not only the two candidates but the policies they will bring in, the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

I delayed my father’s funeral because of cricket.

Solitude is independence.

Only the shallow know themselves.

There is probably a perverse pride in my administration… that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.