Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

Seeing myself on the screen makes me cringe. I understand that I am that way – pouty.

God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself. This is neither easy nor natural, but it is essential.

You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.

Our personal intelligence is everlasting and divine.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

When someone bestows something on you, no matter how true it is, when someone says, ‚Sexiest Man Alive,‘ I’m honestly going, ‚Thank you. Right on.‘ For me, it’s never canceled out anything, it’s never made me go, ‚Does this make me less talented of an actor?‘

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

I will not be concerned at other men’s not knowing me; I will be concerned at my own want of ability.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

No, I’m not a French designer either. I’m from nowhere. I’m a European, old European is all I am.

If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.