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

I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I’ve always been like that; I don’t smile in any pictures.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Actors know what actors are insecure about – and they’re all insecure.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

I searched for years I found no love. I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

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.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I’ve found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

If every choice you make comes from an honest place, you’re solid, and nothing anybody can say about you can rock you or change your opinion.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I’m quite shy.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

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

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

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.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

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.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Hatred is settled anger.

Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.

I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I’m an idiot.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

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.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.