Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

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.

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

Sometimes I feel like being an intellectual. Sometimes I like to just be aggressive and all the way in my feelings. Sometimes I might be emotional, or sometimes I might drag on the track and be lazy. I just like to share the different states of existence of Kevin Gates with the rest of the world.

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

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

I disagree with everything I used to say.

I go to all these photo shoots, and each time I figure out something new about myself and what I want to wear.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

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

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

The ‚soul‘ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

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.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

Only the insecure strive for security.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.

I want people to draw strength from me.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Just try new things. Don’t be afraid. Step out of your comfort zones and soar, all right?

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

If there are people you haven’t forgiven, you’re not going to really awaken. You have to let go.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Don’t let the incidents which take place in life bring you low. And certainly don’t whine. You can be brought low, that’s OK, but don’t be reduced by them. Just say, ‚That’s life.‘

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It’s a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That’s why I need to throw curve balls.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

Playing Etta James in the movie ‚Cadillac Records‘ really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It’s no fun being safe.

I just feel so much more comfortable and confident every game I play.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

We are wiser than we know.