People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

I think for my bones and my size, I better stay with my 60 kilo.

Rappers aren’t the really rich ones. We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone’s business to be super wealthy.

I am in my own head most of the time.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

I’m not a marketing person. I don’t ask myself questions. I go by instinct.

I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

In my experience, many people confuse being cowardly with being nice.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‚satisfactory,‘ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

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

I don’t ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing ‚cos that’s just… that’s just telling yourself a lie.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

There’s only one person in this race who will be there, who’s always been there for you, and that’s Hillary Clinton’s life story.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It’s all hip-hop. You can’t say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.