It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

I’m concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I’m aiming for, which is not such a good thing.

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

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

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

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.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

I’m only as good as my last word, my last hook, my last bridge.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

If you have the ability to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start over, you come out stronger because you learn from whatever mistakes you made.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

It has been hard for me to find it, but I have found love.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

My overall look on things is a lot more mature than it used to be.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

I’m a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why – when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult – we wonder why we cower and we run away.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.

Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

I’ve lived a very colorful life, and I’ve said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them – and I won’t.

My father wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. I took some of that. He would snap, but the older he got, he started calming down. He learned about life, but the thing that he taught my whole family was that family was the most important thing and, no matter what, if a family member needs you, you go and help them out; you get there.

Some people are very good at being ‚stars‘ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.

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

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

I got teased my entire school life. What they were picking on I don’t even understand.

I was sure I’d set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth – that I hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if ‚The Big Trail‘ had been a success and launched me as a star.