A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

Love is a serious mental disease.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

If you like a person you say ‚let’s go into business together.‘ Man is a social animal after all, but such partnerships are fraught with danger.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

I think fearless is having fears but jumping anyway.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

People love conspiracy theories.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.