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

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.

The self is hateful.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy.

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.

I don’t look at my old work. I mean, they made nice books; the books were made without me, the one from last year and the one from this year. I – personally, I’m not interested in my own past. I’m only interested in today – perhaps tomorrow.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

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

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

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

Love is a better teacher than duty.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

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.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can’t find.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.