The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

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

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

When people are lame, they love to blame.

To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

I know who I am, I know what I can and can’t do. I know what I will and won’t do. I know what I’m capable of and I don’t agree to do things that I don’t think I can pull off.

Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don’t know nothing. I mean, that’s my life lesson.

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

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

I don’t know who I touch and who I don’t. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know the reasons I’ve been so well received.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Every time you think the problem is ‚out there,‘ that very thought is the problem.

I wouldn’t say that I am one of the greatest dancers, but I am really quite good at what I do.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‚Ego‘.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

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.

I’m a human being. I’ve got opinions, I’m not always right, I’m not always on time, I don’t always say things in the proper way, but my intentions are always extremely pure.

I’m not a natural born performer.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

Be content to seem what you really are.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

I could never give relationship advice to anybody!

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

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.

I have my flaws too, but I am a professional who doesn’t like to miss or lose.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.