If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

Every man is his own hell.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

It is my own firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.

I don’t think I get that upset over things.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

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

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

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

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

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

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

I have made a few mistakes early on that I admit myself, and there have been times when I have gone over the top and done things that you shouldn’t do in international cricket, but that’s how you learn.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

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.

I’m definitely gaining new fans, and that’s the key of any success… gain more love.

My business acumen is definitely growing.

I’m an emotional person. Sometimes I can’t help it.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.