I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

I’m not a natural joiner.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

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.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Choose people who lift you up.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

‚Victory Lap,‘ even the title. It’s the accumulation of trial and error; that’s what I represent; trial and error.

A lot of times, people feel that if they forgive the person who hurt them, then they will continue to take advantage of them or not take responsibility for what they did wrong.

Enemies are so stimulating.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

Whenever you’re going through a tough time, generally, you become more compassionate, you become softer, you become more thoughtful, kinder. These are all spiritual qualities that will help you to align yourself with God and God consciousness rather than with a split fear-based consciousness.

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

I have to keep improving myself and challenging myself.

I don’t have all the answers.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

You need to understand what works best for your own body.

You can bear your own faults, and why not a fault in your wife?

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‚be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough‘ are not true. They are fairy tales.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

I’m a genetic optimist.

The devil is a peace stealer, and he works hard to set us up to get upset. But we can learn how to change our approach so we don’t live upset all of the time. And Jesus gives us the best example to follow.

I don’t have to be what you want me to be.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.