I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

Real firmness is good for anything; strut is good for nothing.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

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.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

I could never give relationship advice to anybody!

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

You gotta keep trying to find your niche and trying to fit into whatever slot that’s left for you or to make one of your own.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance.

My whole family have all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Things do not change; we change.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

WWE is a space where I thrived, and I loved, and I still do. I love connecting with an audience; that is the greatest thing about going back to WWE.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

My life is a struggle.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

You should never give up your inner self.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

I love stuff from the Holy Land. It makes me feel blessed.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.