The only shame is to have none.

Every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he be free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

‚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.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized – never knowing.

If you have the ability to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start over, you come out stronger because you learn from whatever mistakes you made.

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.

I’m not going to get somewhere and say, ‚OK, I’m done.‘ Success is never final; I’ll just keep on going. The same way as failure never being fatal. Just keep going. I’m going to the stars and then past them.

It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

God always wants us to be growing.

What keeps me motivated is love and passion.

For me, education was power.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Whatever I engage in, I must push inordinately.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

A daily portion is really all we need. We do not need tomorrow’s supply, for that day has not yet dawned, and its needs are still unborn.

I don’t want to be an action star, an action star’s life is so short. I want my life to get longer, I want my career to get longer.

You need to understand what works best for your own body.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.

We work to become, not to acquire.

I’m going to use all my tools, my God-given ability, and make the best life I can with it.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

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.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become.

We are what we believe we are.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

It’s easy to become very self-critical when you’re an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

God wants to use you to make other people happy! And the happier you make others, the happier you will be because you reap what you sow.