Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature.

I’m a human being. I’ve got opinions, I’m not always right, I’m not always on time, I don’t always say things in the proper way, but my intentions are always extremely pure.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

I’m quite a chauvinistic person.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

If you’re yelling you’re the one who’s lost control of the conversation.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

I’ve always been really, really aware of my insecurities – really, really aware. I never developed that thick skin that keeps you from letting things get to you.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

Hatred is settled anger.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

A woman knows by intuition, or instinct, what is best for herself.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

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.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

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

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

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

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it’s a natural thing.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.