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

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

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

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

I do not live on false promises. I cannot afford to live on bad advice.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

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.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I’m learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, ‚I can’t go to Kmart. I can’t take my kids to the haunted house.‘

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

You know, not to sound corny or nuthin‘, but I felt like a fighter comin‘ up, man. I felt like, you know, I’m being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.

My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

People want to feel hopeful.

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don’t know nothing. I mean, that’s my life lesson.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

I think I had a mild case of Asperger’s as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while.

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

Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

You have to be able to accept failure to get better.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, ‚I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior’s power to bless others.‘

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

The big message of gospel is that you don’t have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.