Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Be content to seem what you really are.

I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.

You may be always victorious if you will never enter into any contest where the issue does not wholly depend upon yourself.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

If a whole bunch of people want to make your life a living hell, they’re gonna do it.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

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?‘

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

People say you have to hit rock bottom, and, I can tell you, almost dying is as rock bottom as it gets.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

I don’t think I get angry.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

We are wiser than we know.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Man is not made for defeat.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

Even with my divorce and with everything, I don’t need money.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

I built a label at the same time I built a career.

It’s always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.

Had I been a great athlete, I’m not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

Good luck has its storms.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The more successful I become, the more I need a man.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

My number one thing? Don’t overleverage yourself. Don’t say you can do something when you really can’t.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

If you’re going to spend two years of your life on something, it has to matter to you; you have to be passionate about it.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

To our brothers in Latin America and the world, we must convey that the Cuban people will overcome.

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

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.