If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

No one has the right to be sorry for himself for a misfortune that strikes everyone.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

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.

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

I’m not this horrible, evil person.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn’t bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn’t have any brains. I didn’t know what I was doing there. That’s why I became an actor.

It’s much more fun to play something you’re nothing like than what you are… It’s much easier to hide yourself in a character.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

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.‘

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

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.

I am who I am today because of my mother.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

One of my proudest moments is I didn’t sell my soul for the sake of popularity.

I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

Guarding your heart and protecting your dignity are a little bit more important than clarifying the emotions of someone who’s only texting you back three words. I’ve learned that from trying to figure out people who don’t deserve to be figured out.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

As the father of eight children, I’m quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries – it’s the I that’s in the ever-changing body.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

In the beginning, I was very insecure. I hated how I looked in pictures.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

The trained mind is a rich mind.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

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.

If you consider the definition of authenticity, it’s saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.