Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you’d experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

There’s many ups and downs in the fight game.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Be happy with being you. Love your flaws. Own your quirks. And know that you are just as perfect as anyone else, exactly as you are.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

Life’s too short to deal with other people’s insecurities.

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.

I’m not looking for sympathy at all.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

We boil at different degrees.

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different teams they’ve played on, coaches they’ve played for.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

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.

I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

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.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

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.

I allow myself to fail. I allow myself to break. I’m not afraid of my flaws.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

I believe that one key to success is to accept truth, no matter how it’s spoken.

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

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

My whole life is a theater piece.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.

We all have done something unethical.

I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty clever. But there’s a lot that you hone in on when you finish your education.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.