Hatred is self-punishment.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

What you are comes to you.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

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 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.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

It’s only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I’m skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I’m big, when I was big, I never thought about it.

I don’t think a lot of people know personally who I am.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

Only the shallow know themselves.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

I don’t ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing ‚cos that’s just… that’s just telling yourself a lie.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

There are no rules when it comes to love.

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

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.