I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

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.

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.

We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean… and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‚How is the president?‘

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

I guess I’m living in the present more than the past.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

I’m not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I’ve always liked the Buddhist religion. When I’ve been to Japan, I’ve been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

I just make good movies. That’s the way I thank my fans.

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Total relaxation is the secret to enjoying sitting meditation. I sit with my spine upright, but not rigid; and I relax all the muscles in my body.

There’s people that appreciate what I do; there’s people that criticize it.

If you are not living this moment, you are not really living.

I think and that is all that I am.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

I’m almost like three people. There’s me the, Dolly, the person. There’s me, the star. And then there’s me, the manager.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

This is not a bad life.

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

I try to live what I teach. A lot of things come against us in life, but we should try to find something to be grateful for, and see each day as a gift.

If you desire many things, many things will seem few.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

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.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.