I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

We should purify our innate well of contentment – what a wonderful expression – and then external things will be in harmony with us.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

Writing bores me so.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.

God always takes the simplest way.

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

Want balance in your life? Then sure, get your own act together, but don’t forget four powerful disciplines of execution in your team and organization.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Think not that humility is weakness; it shall supply the marrow of strength to thy bones. Stoop and conquer; bow thyself and become invincible.

I’m a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why – when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult – we wonder why we cower and we run away.

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.