We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

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 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’m aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

I don’t think a lot of people know personally who I am.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

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.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

I’m a bold Christian, not a scaredy-cat Christian.

You just have to have a simple faith.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

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.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

I wish that the Indians believed me a god, for upon the report of an enemy’s valor oftentimes depends the success of a battle, and false reports have many times done as great things as true courage and resolution.

Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.