My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

Every day is a gift from God, no matter how old we are.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I like pushing boundaries.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

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

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

Character is power.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

Success is only meaningful and enjoyable if it feels like your own.

I never had a speech from my father ‚this is what you must do or shouldn’t do‘ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

Next to God we are nothing. To God we are Everything.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I’m going to grow artistically.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Learning to live for others isn’t something that just comes naturally to anybody. You have to train yourself to do it.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

I don’t have to be what you want me to be.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

I have no human feelings.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

Absolutely not. I have no problem with commitment. In fact, I love having someone in my life.

The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

My ‚fear‘ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.