It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

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.

Only the insecure strive for security.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Be not a slave of words.

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

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I never thought of losing, but now that it‘ s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That’s my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Oh, hour of forgiven sin, moment of perfect pardon, our soul shall never forget you while, within you, life and being find immortality!

Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

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

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

I knew ‚Crenshaw‘ had elevated me and distinguished me.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Why go through life if you’re not going to challenge yourself?

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.

It’s so easy to settle for less than God’s best for us because we don’t always feel like taking responsibility for our behavior or putting forth some effort to do what we need to do so we can accomplish great things for God and help people. But the cost of settling for less is actually harder than being completely obedient to God’s will.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Libraries raised me.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

I don’t have all the answers.

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.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

I don’t think I’m an unlucky person.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

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.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.