It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Oh, God, I struggle with low self-esteem all the time! I think everyone does. I have so much wrong with me, it’s unbelievable!

The pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

‚Victory Lap,‘ even the title. It’s the accumulation of trial and error; that’s what I represent; trial and error.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

I can handle pain.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

I’ve done many ads because that’s my new career. It’s an inspiring extension for my mind.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I’m a whopping 5 foot 4 inches tall. I’m not going to get any taller.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

Learn to say ‚no‘ to the good so you can say ‚yes‘ to the best.

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

I feel matured in a way that I’m happy about. I’m at this other stage in my life – and it’s not a bad thing at all.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

I was adored once too.

When I left the University of Notre Dame, I honestly felt I would never coach again.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

When I was married, I definitely went through a lying period.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

Don’t feel sorry for me.

I think everybody’s trying to get to a place in themselves where they conquer what they was afraid of; they achieve some of their life goals, kept their word about what they were trying to do.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

What interests me in life is curiosity, challenges, the good fight with its victories and defeats.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

In the beginning, I was very insecure. I hated how I looked in pictures.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

I am happy and I’m single.