I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

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.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

I knew ‚Crenshaw‘ had elevated me and distinguished me.

I’ve learned over the years that when I go to that place of passion within me, there’s no force in the universe that can interfere with my completing a project.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

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.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

There are phases in life which surface at times, and it makes you understand that despite you working hard, everything what you are doing is probably not enough. That’s when you need to look around, and beyond.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it’s only us. And we’re only responsible to make ourselves happy.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one’s direction seconds after its birth.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Things do not change; we change.

I’m not intimidated by how people perceive me.

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.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

I didn’t leave bodybuilding until I felt that I had gone as far as I could go. It will be the same with my film career. When I feel the time is right, I will then consider public service. I feel that the highest honor comes from serving people and your country.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

I guess I’m living in the present more than the past.

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.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

It is always your next move.

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.

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

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

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

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

I grew up in a funny way.

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

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

I look at where I’m at today and realize that most of my success is owed to the mentors that was in my life.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

We are wiser than we know.

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

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.