I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

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

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Playing bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

First and foremost, we need to be the adults we want our children to be. We should watch our own gossiping and anger. We should model the kindness we want to see.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

I’ve never been reckless – it’s always calculated. I’m mischievous, but I’m calculated.

The intention and outcome of vulnerability is trust, intimacy and connection. The outcome of oversharing is distrust, disconnection – and usually a little judgment.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I don’t crave applause. I’m not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I’m much more alive at home, I think.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

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

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

No person is important enough to make me angry.

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

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.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

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

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

We think too much and feel too little.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

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

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.