If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don’t want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

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

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

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

I’ve always strived to be successful, not famous.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about football. I thought about following in my family’s footsteps and going into professional wrestling.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

Absolutely not. I have no problem with commitment. In fact, I love having someone in my life.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It’s good that the person I’m being onstage isn’t really an act. It’s really me.

I’m very, very serious – I’m serious enough not to take myself too seriously. That means I can be completely wedded to the moment. But when I leave that moment, I want to be completely wedded to the next moment.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can’t even get into his own Hall of Fame.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

I feel real good because it’s about representing the young world and how to uplift each other and how to push us to be greater and make sure we don’t fall or get trapped or get in trouble, you know what I mean. Stay focused, you know what I mean.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

I don’t tell people, ‚You’re okay the way that you are.‘ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‚You’re way less than you could be.‘

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

It’s every girl’s dream to be a cover girl!

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

Some day I shall be President.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

I’ve always wanted to live above my means because it inspired me to work harder.

I think that when you’re making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.

Life is about growing and improving and getting better.