I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

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.

Travel teaches toleration.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

A youth, when at home, should be filial and, abroad, respectful to his elders. He should be earnest and truthful. He should overflow in love to all and cultivate the friendship of the good. When he has time and opportunity, after the performance of these things, he should employ them in polite studies.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

When you love and accept yourself, when you know who really cares about you, and when you learn from your mistakes, then you stop caring about what people who don’t know you think.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

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

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

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.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

I’ve arrived at the place if I’m not taking a career risk, I’m not happy. If I’m scared, then I know I’m being challenged.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

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

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

There are phases in life which surface at times, and it makes you understand that despite you working hard, everything what you are doing is probably not enough. That’s when you need to look around, and beyond.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

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

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

I was willing to accept what I couldn’t change.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I enjoyed climbing with other people, good friends, but I did quite a lot of solo climbing, too.

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.

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in your seeds.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

Prayer is simply talking to God like a friend and should be the easiest thing we do each day.

My reputation grows with every failure.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

Some people would like me to be round again.

I used to have insecurity about my finances, then I announced that I had debt, and now I don’t have any insecurities.

I can’t keep somebody from being a star, and I can’t make somebody a star, and nobody can.