Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

He who acts with a constant view to his own advantage will be much murmured against.

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.

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.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

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.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

The last person I have ever criticized is an official. They have a tough job to do. Things are happening so quick.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don’t want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

We all have done something unethical.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

I’m not this horrible, evil person.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

I really have no interest in myself.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

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.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.