Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I’m successful, I never feel like I’m anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I’m never content.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

I have no delusions about my likability in every scenario. I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

I don’t want followers.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

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.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

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

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

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

Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.

I kinda live where I find myself.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

I still consider it a summer job, though. So, I try to maintain that summer job as long as I can. But it’s exciting to be able to have the opportunity to do things I always dreamed of as a kid.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Confine yourself to the present.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

When you can whip any man in the world, you never know peace.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

You need to understand what works best for your own body.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.