Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

I think we need more idiot control.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

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.

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I’ve got Alzheimer’s.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

I’m no genius.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‚How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?‘

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

What I love best in life is new starts.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

I never expected to be anybody important.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Within all of us is a divine capacity to manifest and attract all that we need and desire.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe; I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent, I have reached the top of the acting profession.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th‘ observer’s sake.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don’t live angry, let go now!

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

None but ourselves can free our minds.

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.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

You don’t have to give way to careless speech or complaining. You don’t have to let your feelings get in the way of what God wants to do in your life.

Time is kind of an amazing thing because you can do so much with it. I think people underestimate time… I don’t want to just sit on my phone for hours.

By indignities men come to dignities.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

If you want to be a voice for peace in the world, begin by making peace a permanent condition of your own life.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

Partition is bad. But whatever is past is past. We have only to look to the future.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.