I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It’s not heavy. I don’t have skeletons in the closet on their way out.

Solitude is independence.

Believe me, I’m much easier to be around when we win than when we lose.

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.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

The people in my songs are all me.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

Ageing’s alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

I’ve lived a very colorful life, and I’ve said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them – and I won’t.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

I don’t have many sad days.

Many churches today have special programs for people who are grieving, and these can be very helpful.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Never complain and never explain.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

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

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

For me, training is my meditation, my yoga, hiking, biking all rolled into one. Wake up early in the morning, generally around 4 o’clock, and I’ll do my cardio on an empty stomach. Stretch, have a big breakfast, and then I’ll go train.

You not supposed to feel down over whatever happen to you. I mean, you’re supposed to use whatever happen to you as some type of upper, not a downer.

If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

I think and that is all that I am.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

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.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

My friends, there are no friends.

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

Nobody knows me.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?