The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what life brings to me.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

I never felt settled or calm. You can’t really commit to life when you feel that.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Listening to and understanding our inner sufferings will resolve most of the problems we encounter.

I never looked at my mantel and envisioned an MVP trophy sitting there. This is pretty crazy.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Vanity is but the surface.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

Sometimes I’m fascinated with how famous my work could be while I’m not so famous.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

And die of nothing but a rage to live.

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

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

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

You get one life. I’m going to embrace mine.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

Children make your life important.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.