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

People always say that you can’t please everybody. I think that’s a cop-out. Why not attempt it? ‚Cause think of all the people you will please if you try.

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

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

No person is important enough to make me angry.

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

We boil at different degrees.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Not being afraid to be wrong – I had to learn how to do that.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

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.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

I’m not a natural born performer.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

I’ve never been reckless – it’s always calculated. I’m mischievous, but I’m calculated.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

I think everybody’s trying to get to a place in themselves where they conquer what they was afraid of; they achieve some of their life goals, kept their word about what they were trying to do.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

You will be as much value to others as you have been to yourself.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

What I have in common with the character in ‚Truman‘ is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we’re hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

If you’re going to spend two years of your life on something, it has to matter to you; you have to be passionate about it.

I’ve learned people are watching, so don’t do nothing stupid.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

I’m tender on the inside.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.