Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

I always wanted a family.

I’ve learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I’m going to grow artistically.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.

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

I don’t let even a day go by wherein I don’t give at 100 per cent.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

I didn’t consider myself a fashion designer at all at the time of punk. I was just using fashion as a way to express my resistance and to be rebellious. I came from the country, and by the time I got to London, I considered myself to be very stupid. It was my ambition to understand the world I live in.

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

There is no way to happiness – happiness is the way.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

True wealth is not of the pocket, but of the heart and of the mind.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

The reward of suffering is experience.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

I created myself. I have taught myself so much.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, ‚I’m not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.‘ Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, ‚Yes, I deserve it.‘

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

When I was old enough to change my name, I changed it to Mr. T so that the first word out of someone’s mouth was ‚Mister,‘ a sign of respect.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

I wish they would only take me as I am.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.