Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.

My future is righteousness.

Face your fears and doubts, and new worlds will open to you.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

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?‘

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won’t have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore.

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.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

Some people are very good at being ‚stars‘ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

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.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

I have survivor’s curiosity, I guess.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.

But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.

When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.

Nothing on ‚Relapse‘ and very little on ‚Recovery‘ was produced by me.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

The world can criticize me, but l can always criticize it back.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

I think it’s my responsibility, as a person of influence… to sometimes try to do what I can.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

I feel real good because it’s about representing the young world and how to uplift each other and how to push us to be greater and make sure we don’t fall or get trapped or get in trouble, you know what I mean. Stay focused, you know what I mean.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

If you try to protect yourself from pain, it becomes a stone in your heart. But the more you learn to face things, the more likely that stone can become a pearl.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

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