All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‚If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?‘ And whenever the answer has been ‚No‘ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

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

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

I am in my own head most of the time.

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.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

I was a thug.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

The honor of a nation is its life.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

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.

I like actors very much, but to marry one would be like marrying your brother. You look too much alike in the mirror.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

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.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The older I get, the more important the eternal becomes to me personally.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

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

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

The people in my songs are all me.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

Honoring the priesthood fosters respect, respect promotes reverence, and reverence invites revelation.

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Nobody knows me.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

The self is hateful.