I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Forgotten is forgiven.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It’s good that the person I’m being onstage isn’t really an act. It’s really me.

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

‚God‘ is a relative word and has a respect to servants, and ‚Deity‘ is the dominion of God, not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.

I am absolutely my own biggest critic.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

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.

Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality – it connects you to reality.

I work very hard, but when God opens that door for you – when life opens that door for you, I should say – I think it’s important to be giving, to return the love back.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

Our inquiring friends and neighbors not of our faith can also catch the wave. We encourage them to keep all that is good and true in their lives. And we invite them to receive more, especially the glorious truth that through God’s eternal plan, families can be together forever.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‚Father, the atheists?‘ Even the atheists. Everyone!

We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

All our actions, as well as our thoughts and words, should praise Him who always blesses us.

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

Love is a state of being.

I’m totally myself.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

I was always respectful of people who were deeply religious because I always felt that if they gave themselves to it, then it had to be important to them. But if you can go through life without it, that’s OK, too. It’s whatever suits you.

Don’t say I hate institutionalised religion – rather than saying I hate those things, which I do not, what I’m saying is that perhaps there is a way of opening more doors, rather than closing so many.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

I am happy and I’m single.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

We’re not like robots. God promises to guide us through the Holy Spirit, but He gives us the freedom to make our own decisions.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

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