Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

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

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

It’s easy to become very self-critical when you’re an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended, and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

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

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

I am, as a character, at times, a little overbearing. I recognize that.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Confine yourself to the present.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

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.

We all have done something unethical.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

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

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

Every time you think the problem is ‚out there,‘ that very thought is the problem.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

‚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.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

The people in my songs are all me.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

I’m my own worst critic, and if I don’t pull off what I think I wanted to do in my head, then I won’t be a happy girl.

There are two kinds of people in this world. ‚I‘ people and ‚we‘ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‚we‘ person.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.