Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

I don’t live in the past at all; I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

I’m a human being. I’ve got opinions, I’m not always right, I’m not always on time, I don’t always say things in the proper way, but my intentions are always extremely pure.

I dote on his very absence.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

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.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

I can be a cruel person.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

If your mom cries a lot, you probably cry a lot. It’s what you learn.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

I believe that one key to success is to accept truth, no matter how it’s spoken.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

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

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

Every day is a gift from God. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow, so that tells me to see the good in this day to make the most of it.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

I am a simple Buddhist monk – no more, no less.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

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.

It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

We think too much and feel too little.

We’re one of the only animals in the world that don’t really think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals, and we must respect our fellow animals.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.