We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Had I been a great athlete, I’m not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

There’s a difference in thinking you are a champion and knowing that you are.

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

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

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

Our personal intelligence is everlasting and divine.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

I’m very secure about my talents and about who I am.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

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.

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

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

The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

I’ve had no problem harnessing anger.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

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

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

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.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

I always have a full-length mirror next to the camera when I’m doing publicity stills. That way, I know how I look.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

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

I really have no interest in myself.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.