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

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

When you’re in hell, you forget how great you really are because you’re suffering and you forget the great things you’ve done.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

Absolutely not. I have no problem with commitment. In fact, I love having someone in my life.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

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!

My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

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

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.

I still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

I was raised to be independent.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I always was that person who was hard on myself and challenged myself no matter what I was doing, whether it was passing third grade or playing basketball.

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

I’m very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn’t choose.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

Always do whatever’s next.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

Spiritual people don’t float around all day on clouds of glory; they live in the real world and deal with real issues in real ways.

I know, to banish anger altogether from one’s breast is a difficult task. It cannot be achieved through pure personal effort. It can be done only by God’s grace.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about – having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Resist the need to be ‚right‘ all the time or to always have the last word.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

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

Without being the most confident person in the world, I think I am the right person for Liverpool.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.