Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

Be content to seem what you really are.

How does a nice Catholic girl end up going to prison for a year? It’s crazy. I’ve made mistakes. I have to pay for those mistakes.

Choose people who lift you up.

I never deny. I never contradict. I sometimes forget.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

The man who has no problems is out of the game.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

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.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

My life is my message.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

I’ve made my share of mistakes along the way, but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven’t lived in vain.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

I never hold a grudge.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

I used to really love Fiend, but he stopped. He just stopped. Every time he had a project, every project – ‚There’s One In Every Family,‘ ‚Street Life‘ – I had to have them. And he just stopped. And that was disappointing, ‚cause that was my favorite rapper at one time.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

We are wiser than we know.

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

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

She never envisioned a legal career for me, but she did think it was very important that I be able to support myself, and I think she would be pleased to see what has become of me.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

Yeah, I was a delinquent. It was when I was in the ninth grade. I was doing stupid stuff, and the cops came into the class. I was humiliated more than anything.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

I don’t have all the answers.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.