There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

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

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Dancing in high heels is kind of tough. I learn the dances without the heels, and then we add them. We just practice, and I get used to it. My feet hurt really badly at the end of the shows, but it’s fun. While it’s happening it’s fun. I feel tall.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

Tell the children the truth.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

When it comes to our everyday habits, it’s important to ask: ‚Am I putting God first?‘

I don’t say very much I don’t really think through. I know that sounds inconsistent with Joe Biden.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Before I do a stunt, I have to make sure it is safe.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

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

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Faith never makes a confession.

Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

A chorus is not easy.

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

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘