I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don’t think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you’ve done up to now.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

At the end of the day, I understand that life has road blocks, and life is like school – you’ll be tested; we gotta pass it.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

I’m very, very serious – I’m serious enough not to take myself too seriously. That means I can be completely wedded to the moment. But when I leave that moment, I want to be completely wedded to the next moment.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

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.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

When you can whip any man in the world, you never know peace.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Prime time for men is, say, 35 to 45. Then they level off and fall off.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

I’m very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn’t choose.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

We cannot learn men from books.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

What you put into life is what you get out of it.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

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.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

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

One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.