When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I wish they would only take me as I am.

I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.

I was born with a happy heart, and I try to keep a good attitude. It’s not true that I’m happy all the time because nobody is, and we all go through our things.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

No man is hurt but by himself.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Each day provides its own gifts.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

There’s a part of you – the born-again part, your spirit – that’s dead to sin. That’s why it bothers you now when you sin. The ‚wilderness‘ part of you – your soul – is your unrenewed mind, out-of-control emotions, and stubborn will.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

The closest I ever came to getting married was just before I started singing. In fact, my first record saved my neck.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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.

We think too much and feel too little.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

My overall look on things is a lot more mature than it used to be.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

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

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

There’s room for role models who make mistakes.

People don’t usually compliment your character.

I like to take it easy.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

It’s not an easy course. It’s not designed to be. We’re not here to get you in touch with your inner child.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

I’m never going to be fast, and nobody will ever mistake me for being fast.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.