There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

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!

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

I tend to overthink things. I’m not the guy who screams ‚This is a world smash!‘ when I finish a song.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

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.

I have trouble with letting go. That’s my problem.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

I never said I was the best in anything. I never said I’m an icon. The world decides all of that.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Know that any and all thoughts that you have regarding your own skills, interests, and inclinations are valid. To reinforce the validity of your thoughts, keep them private. Tell yourself that they’re between you and God.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I’m nobody, who are you?

The Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Love is a state of Being. 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.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

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.

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‚Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.‘

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

I’m addicted to placebos.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

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

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

The world can criticize me, but l can always criticize it back.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.