Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.

I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.

I don’t tell people, ‚You’re okay the way that you are.‘ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‚You’re way less than you could be.‘

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested – I’ll kind of throw myself into some area that I don’t completely know or understand, that I’m not adept at, so I’m forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There’s a good feeling that comes from that.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

Individuals need to be willing to face truth about their attitudes, behaviors, even what we want out of life.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

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

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

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

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

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.

Never complain and never explain.

I continuously go further and further learning about my own limitations, my body limitation, psychological limitations. It’s a way of life for me.