Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

We cannot learn men from books.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

I’m not a natural joiner.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

I kinda live where I find myself.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

Oh, I’ve always been very… Emotional. ‚Hypersensitive‘ is what they call it, I think.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take ten forward.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

My lectures, based on Islamic teachings, were on various subjects. Some of the titles were, ‚The Intoxication of Life,‘ ‚The Purpose of Life,‘ ‚The Real Cause of Man’s Distress,‘ ‚The Journey to the Goal in Life,‘ and, one of my favorites, ‚The Heart of Man.‘ They contained important insights that spoke to something deep inside me.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

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.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

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

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

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.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

If I make a fool of myself, who cares? I’m not frightened by anyone’s perception of me.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

My life is my argument.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‚Thy will be done,‘ and those to whom God says, ‚All right, then, have it your way.‘

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I’m not perfect.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th‘ observer’s sake.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different teams they’ve played on, coaches they’ve played for.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

I laugh and joke, but I don’t get distracted very easily.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

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.

Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

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