It’s always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.

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.

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

In my next incarnation, I want to be a writer.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

‚Perfection‘ to me is, I walk away from a situation and say, ‚I did everything I could do right there. There was nothing more that I could do.‘ I was a hundred percent, like the meter was at the top. There was nothing else I could have done. You know? Like, I worked as hard as I possibly could have. That’s perfection.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

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

It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

I let the American people down.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

I don’t want followers.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

I don’t want to be something that just comes and goes.

You know, not to sound corny or nuthin‘, but I felt like a fighter comin‘ up, man. I felt like, you know, I’m being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I put my flaws on front street. So the world accepted my flaws, so I don’t have any flaws.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

The same thing I did in 2013 is what I’m trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

I am sure as everyone knows that I am not the happiest if I don’t do a good job in qualifying or the race.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

I’m about being the best.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.