I’m very secure about my talents and about who I am.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

I’m quite a chauvinistic person.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

I don’t let even a day go by wherein I don’t give at 100 per cent.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.

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.

So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

I get naturally uncomfortable when I’m put under a magnifying glass.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

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.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn’t bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn’t have any brains. I didn’t know what I was doing there. That’s why I became an actor.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you’d experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

Overall there’s going to be things I’m not great at.

I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.

I want to appeal to everyone. Because I’m not saying I’m the best, but we the best.

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

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

People say you have to hit rock bottom, and, I can tell you, almost dying is as rock bottom as it gets.

As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.