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

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 always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s inviting disaster.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

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

I couldn’t ever go back home without being something. I probably would never have gone back home. That was definitely a big motivation. To get back home, and not empty-handed.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

I’m a genetic optimist.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

My philosophy is it’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

I’m only going to stand before God and give an account for my life, not for somebody else’s life. If I have a bad attitude, then I need to say there’s no point in me blaming you for what’s wrong in my life.

I’ve learned never to say never.

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

I’m sure the feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useless by it, can make you extend yourself beyond what you would regard as your capacity. If you’re afraid, the blood seems to flow freely through the veins, and you really do feel a sense of stimulation.

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I was raised to be independent.

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.‘

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‚How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?‘

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.