While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

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

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything or anyone, you’re aligning yourself with the beautiful dance of life.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

Some people would like me to be round again.

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.

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.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

The hardest thing for – not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Solitude is independence.

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

I believe in this concept that you learn by teaching.

What we live by we die by.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.