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.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

My confidence is easy to shake. I am very well aware of all of my flaws. I am aware of all the insecurities that I have.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

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.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

If you make yourself indispensable to your employer, he is not going to part with you in a hurry no matter what it costs him.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

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

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.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

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.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

You aren’t your work, your accomplishments, your possessions, your home, your family… your anything. You’re a creation of your Source, dressed in a physical human body intended to experience and enjoy life on Earth.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

My life is mine to remember.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

It just seems there’s better things to do in your life than be on television if it’s not interesting, if it’s not challenging, if it’s not fun. You know? When it stops being those things for me, I’ll stop making television.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.