I never said I was the best in anything. I never said I’m an icon. The world decides all of that.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by my friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance.

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.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Be the chief but never the lord.

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.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

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

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

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.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

Lord Jesus, we come just as we are; this is how we came at first, and this is how we come still, with all our failures, with all our transgressions, with all and everything that is what it ought not to be, we come to Thee.

The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

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.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Vanity is but the surface.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‚Huh. It works. It makes sense.‘

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Men must know their limitations.

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

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized – never knowing.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

The fact is, I was never too bright in school. I ain’t ashamed of it, though. I mean, how much do school principals make a month?

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

I’m not perfect.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Oh, I’ve always been very… Emotional. ‚Hypersensitive‘ is what they call it, I think.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

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.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

It feels good to have your work respected again.