The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit.

These times are so hard, and they’re getting even harder.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Back in the day, what motivated me was overcoming myself. Now I believe in being a leader. I’ve done it all – I’m good. Now, it’s about setting an example for others to follow. I can’t just talk it – I have to live it.

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

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

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

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

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

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

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

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

When you love and accept yourself, when you know who really cares about you, and when you learn from your mistakes, then you stop caring about what people who don’t know you think.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

To our brothers in Latin America and the world, we must convey that the Cuban people will overcome.

There’s a part of you – the born-again part, your spirit – that’s dead to sin. That’s why it bothers you now when you sin. The ‚wilderness‘ part of you – your soul – is your unrenewed mind, out-of-control emotions, and stubborn will.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it’s only us. And we’re only responsible to make ourselves happy.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.

The devil is a peace stealer, and he works hard to set us up to get upset. But we can learn how to change our approach so we don’t live upset all of the time. And Jesus gives us the best example to follow.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

There are a lot of ‚chicken Christians.‘ Chickens are generally afraid of life, and they seldom fly or reach their potential in life. And when a storm comes, all they seem to do is flap around the chicken yard, stirring up dirt and running to the chicken house.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.

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