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

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

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

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

It’s not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

Fame is ultimately about the cycles of desire and how to do away with them or manage them well.

I hate violence, yes I do. It’s kind of a dilemma, huh?.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

You know, there is always times where you feel discouraged and things coming against you, but I don’t know if I ever wanted to throw in the towel.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

Love is only one of many passions.

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

If merely ‚feeling good‘ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.

Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

I think women love very hard. We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes, I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

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

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Overall there’s going to be things I’m not great at.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

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

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.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

I’ve had no contact with my daughter for years. That’s her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don’t want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I’m going to grow artistically.

My dad has kind of been the standard for me, he played 16 years in the league, and since I’ve been in the league, every year that I go through and deal with the scratches, the bumps and bruises, just the grind that it is to go through one NBA season.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I’m sure I’ve changed my mind about something. Inevitably, when we grow up – as we get more experience and wiser. Well, I’ve changed my mind about some food that I didn’t like when I was young.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.