Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

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

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

You can’t be happy by doing something groovy.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

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

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

It’s a very strange thing being recognized or looked upon as someone special.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet.

Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.

A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.

I’ve sat in sushi bars, really fine ones, and I know how hard this guy worked, how proud he is. I know you don’t need sauce. I know he doesn’t even want you to pour sauce. And I’ve seen customers come in and do that, and I’ve seen him, as stoic as he tries to remain, I’ve seen him die a little inside.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

If we chew every morsel of our food, in that way we become grateful, and when you are grateful, you are happy.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

I’m quite a chauvinistic person.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

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.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Sadly, the truth is, there aren’t many people who can be put in high positions who won’t start thinking highly of themselves.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

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

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

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.

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.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

As unique as we all are, an awful lot of us want the same things. We want to shake up our current less-than-fulfilling lives. We want to be happier, more loving, forgiving and connected with the people around us.