In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

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.

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn’t interest you, don’t do it – I would have made a terrible mother.

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

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

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

Real riches are the riches possessed inside.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

We are what we believe we are.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

The movie business is a big gamble.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.

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

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

Once you begin to fall off the track and believe you breathe different air to everyone else, you’re doomed; you’re finished.

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

There is no real limit to how much better a person who really commits to getting better can get. Every manager has the potential to become an excellent manager for the rest of his or her career.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

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.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.

Be content to seem what you really are.

I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn’t that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Being beautiful is not so fun when you’re in a business with all men.

I don’t know who I touch and who I don’t. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know the reasons I’ve been so well received.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

Leadership is influence.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

When we trust God more than our feelings, it confuses the devil. I mean, when he throws you his best shot and he can’t budge you from believing God, he won’t know what to do with you anymore.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

It’s very hard to live with yourself if you don’t stick with your moral code.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‚You can do better than this.‘

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.