No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

I have trust issues with allowing other individuals to know my innermost secrets for fear of how I may be viewed. Everyone has this.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

When you think about it, three of our biggest financial decisions in life are made at times of peak emotional excitement: deciding to get married, buying a home, and having kids.

It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

I’m drawn to bad romances.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hate a man for being a friend to her.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

I don’t feel bitterness, I don’t feel anger towards anybody. Fighting is never emotional to me.

When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

I’m always worried about everything. Like spiders.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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

The only thing I’m afraid of is bees. I don’t like bees. I’m allergic to them.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.