Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

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

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

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

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

If all you’re doing is grinding for the man, it’s going to burden you. Once you say, ‚Hey, I’m grinding for the man, but I’m putting money away, and this is part of my exit strategy,‘ you’re working for you.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

I’ve always kinda been a little outcast myself, a little oddball, doin‘ my thing, my own way. And it’s been hard for me to, to be accepted, certainly in the early years of my life.

The people in my songs are all me.

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.

It’s a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.

I’m just like you – I want to be a good human being. I’m doing my best, and I’m working at it. And I’m trying to be a Christian. I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‚I’m a Christian.‘ I always think, ‚Already? You’ve already got it?‘ I’m working at it. And at my age, I’ll still be working at it at 96.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do In His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

Listening to and understanding our inner sufferings will resolve most of the problems we encounter.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

I let the American people down.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

I owe my solitude to other people.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.