Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

I am in my own head most of the time.

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay – and rise!

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

The people in my songs are all me.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

People don’t usually compliment your character.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Everybody has done something that we wish we didn’t say or do and wish we could take it back.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I’m sorry my existence is not very noble or sublime.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

We all self-conscious. I’m just the first to admit it.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

I more fear what is within me than what comes from without.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

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.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

As you think, so shall you become.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.