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

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

Occasionally the conflict between ‚what we stand for‘ and ‚what we do‘ has been forthrightly addressed.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

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

Some Christians feel guilty when they are doing something that isn’t ‚spiritual.‘ Somehow or another, they feel the need to hurry through the grocery store, dash through the house cleaning, and rush through all the daily aspects of life that seem irrelevant to their faith.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

Men must know their limitations.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

I believe time wounds all heels.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

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

Wretched are those who are vindictive and spiteful.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body’s natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

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

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

What you are comes to you.

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