What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

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 like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I’m an idiot.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

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.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

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

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

It’s very inexpensive to give a compliment.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

Sleep is the best meditation.

I’m addicted to placebos.

I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Give yourself more opportunities for privacy, when you are not bombarded with duties and obligations. Privacy is not a rejection of those you love; it is your deserved respite for recharging your batteries.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.

I sometimes ask people, ‚Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you’re having, not the emotions that you’re having, but the very presence of your very being?‘ You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence.

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.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values – and follow my own moral compass – then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.

I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.

Individuals need to be willing to face truth about their attitudes, behaviors, even what we want out of life.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

None but ourselves can free our minds.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

I just think it’s so important not to take yourself too seriously.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.