I suppose my best attribute, if you want to call it that, is sincerity. I can sell sincerity because that’s the way I am.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Never stop fighting until you arrive at your destined place – that is, the unique you. Have an aim in life, continuously acquire knowledge, work hard, and have perseverance to realise the great life.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

I’m always disappointed when people don’t live up to their potential. I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them. But that, too, can change.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Weak character will neutralize all of the other possible good qualities a person might possess.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

We are what we believe we are.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

Honesty is the best policy.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

The idea of recognising your strengths and using them in as versatile a way as you can is cool to me.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. You can make the decision to be free from fear and doubt and return to the brilliant light of love that is always with you.

Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.

I’m not a natural born performer.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

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.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

I don’t make people bend over backwards, and I don’t like that in people. I am definitely no diva.

Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

I didn’t know how to deal with success. If there was a Rock Star 101, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

I do believe in self-help.

Courage – you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn’t want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I have wasted my hours.

I don’t want to look sloppy, because then I feel sloppy.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.