I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.

I don’t compare myself to anyone else; I don’t make comments about anyone else because they do what feels right for them, and that’s okay by me.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‚Funny Face‘ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

For me, it’s about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It’s where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that’s very important to me.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

I don’t have a problem with ageing – in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily… it doesn’t faze me at all.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I’ve got Alzheimer’s.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.

It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what’s mine.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.

You can retire from a job, but don’t ever retire from making extremely meaningful contributions in life.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don’t know nothing. I mean, that’s my life lesson.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

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

Why go through life if you’re not going to challenge yourself?

To become ‚unique,‘ the challenge is to fight the hardest battle which anyone can imagine until you reach your destination.