I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.

No man is hurt but by himself.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

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

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace.

I’m an emotional person.

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.

There’s certainly a side of me that isn’t completely… sane. Or completely ‚even‘ all the time. We all have our dark sides.

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.

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 is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

I can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself.

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.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

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

I’m nobody, who are you?

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

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

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

Usually, people have a tendency to be caught in the worries concerning the future or in the regret concerning the past. There is some kind of energy that is pushing them to run, and they are not able to establish themselves in the present moment.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.