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.

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

You always want to quit while you are ahead. You don’t want to be like a fighter who stays too long in the ring until you’re not performing at your best.

Always do whatever’s next.

I am invariably late for appointments – sometimes as much as two hours. I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong, and too pleasing.

If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn’t mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

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

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

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.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

Think not that humility is weakness; it shall supply the marrow of strength to thy bones. Stoop and conquer; bow thyself and become invincible.

It’s more interesting for me to figure out how to be superior in areas where I’m naive, where I’m a novice.

Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.

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.

We all have done something unethical.

For me, it’s about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It’s where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that’s very important to me.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

When you are learning about a martial art, it is about respect.

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that’s it.

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.

I’m not very articulate.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

I’m a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why – when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult – we wonder why we cower and we run away.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.

Sometimes, if you begin to sing in a halfhearted mood, you can sing yourself up the ladder. Singing will often make the heart rise.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

A great man is always willing to be little.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I’m not going to change the world. You’re not going to change the world. But we can help – we can all help.

Spiritual people don’t float around all day on clouds of glory; they live in the real world and deal with real issues in real ways.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

I don’t see how people are comfortable with seeing other people be great. You can be happy for anybody, but what is your excuse to not want to be great? These people are great because they just say, ‚I’ma do that,‘ and they do it. That’s it. There’s no scientifical process.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‚He is not a lush.‘ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‚Look!‘

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.