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.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

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

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

It is better to risk starving to death then surrender. If you give up on your dreams, what’s left?

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.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

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

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

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

Of course there are moments that you wonder how long you should be doing it because there are other aspects which are not nice, of this lifestyle. But I just love winning.

For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.

Even when you’re 50, you can make the effort to improve your standards.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

Pessimism never won any battle.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

I remember, when I was a young guy in the SEAL teams, I was very afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid or doing dumb things and getting a bad reputation.

We are wiser than we know.

I used to have a real problem with self-pity. Every time the devil would throw a pity party, I would attend.

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.

I think and that is all that I am.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

I do believe in self-help.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

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.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing.

Example is leadership.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

I shook up the world, I shook up the world.

I’ve felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father’s family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

Be not a slave of words.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.

At one time, I was very angry. I even treated fashion like a kind of crusade: you were either with us or against us, that kind of feeling. Now I know we need ideas, not kicking down a door.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

Be as you wish to seem.

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

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.