God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

New York is definitely ready for the word of God.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

I like to work.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

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.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

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.

True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.

That’s all I could ever hope for, to have a positive effect on women. ‚Cos women are powerful, powerful beings. But they’re also the most doubtful beings. They’ll never know – we’ll never know – how powerful we are.

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‚darkness‘ on the walls of his cell.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

As you know, I’m an immigrant. I came over here as an immigrant, and what gave me the opportunities, what made me to be here today, is the open arms of Americans. I have been received. I have been adopted by America.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

I want to thank my Eritrean fans for feeling connected to me and for supporting me. I feel extremely grateful.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.

I don’t want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I’m completely confused. I’m like, ‚Didn’t you make that movie already?‘ I’ve been very fortunate, and I’m well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I’ve got Alzheimer’s.

I wanted to write.

At the end of the day, we started playing football because we loved it.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.