I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.

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.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

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

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

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.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Observe all men, thyself most.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

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

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

Do you not realize that the love the Father bestowed on the perfect Christ He now bestows on you?

I admire people who destroy themselves.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

That’s all I could ever hope for, to have a positive effect on women. ‚Cos women are powerful, powerful beings. But they’re also the most doubtful beings. They’ll never know – we’ll never know – how powerful we are.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Only the shallow know themselves.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

O, had I but followed the arts!

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.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

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