It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

I sometimes ask people, ‚Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you’re having, not the emotions that you’re having, but the very presence of your very being?‘ You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

What we live by we die by.

That’s all I could ever hope for, to have a positive effect on women. ‚Cos women are powerful, powerful beings. But they’re also the most doubtful beings. They’ll never know – we’ll never know – how powerful we are.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologize.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

There is no way to prosperity, prosperity is the way.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I never go into a situation with any type of expectations.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

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

It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone – so far.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

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.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

This is not a bad life.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

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

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

To be is to do.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

I have made a few mistakes early on that I admit myself, and there have been times when I have gone over the top and done things that you shouldn’t do in international cricket, but that’s how you learn.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.