Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

It has been hard for me to find it, but I have found love.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

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.

I don’t have a problem with ageing – in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily… it doesn’t faze me at all.

I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.

I keep working because I learn something new all the time.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

I have a full and satisfying life. My work and my family are very important to me.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

I’m not a natural joiner.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

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.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it’s only us. And we’re only responsible to make ourselves happy.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

People say I look so happy – and I say, ‚That’s the Botox.‘

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

A woman has the age she deserves.

Relish everything that’s inside of you, the imperfections, the darkness, the richness and light and everything. And that makes for a full life.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

I don’t have the best track record with quotes.

I enjoy competition. I enjoy challenges. If a challenge is in front of me and it appeals to me, I will go ahead and conquer it.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

If someone decides they’re not going to be happy, it’s not your problem. You don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

My life is mine to remember.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

I don’t look at my old work. I mean, they made nice books; the books were made without me, the one from last year and the one from this year. I – personally, I’m not interested in my own past. I’m only interested in today – perhaps tomorrow.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.