The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Have you not learned that strength comes to an ordinary soul when given an extraordinary calling?

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

It’s disgusting, but my father taught me when your mouth gets dry, just suck the sweat out of your own jersey. There’s no bravado to any of it; it’s just a disgusting little trick.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

I kinda live where I find myself.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

Relish everything that’s inside of you, the imperfections, the darkness, the richness and light and everything. And that makes for a full life.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

Needing to have things perfect is the surest way to immobilize yourself with frustration.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Only the shallow know themselves.

I am in my own head most of the time.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

I give opinions, not advice.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

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.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

America is just downright mean.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

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.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

Always do whatever’s next.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I’m very grateful for the support and kindness that we’ve gotten. People have respected their privacy and in that way, I think, you know, no matter what people may feel about my husband’s policies or what have you, they care about children and that’s been good to see.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

It sure is hell to be president.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to Washington.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

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.

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

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

I love money because I’ve earned it. I won sixty G’s with my first knockout – and the week before, I was collecting social welfare.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

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

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

I never give advice unless someone asks me for it. One thing I’ve learned, and possibly the only advice I have to give, is to not be that person giving out unsolicited advice based on your own personal experience.