Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

I’m no genius.

Breathing in, I am aware of my heart. Breathing out, I smile to my heart and know that my heart still functions normally. I feel grateful for my heart.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.

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.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

In fact, my courage and my bravery at a young age was the thing I was bullied for, a kind of ‚Who do you think you are?‘

Be happy with being you. Love your flaws. Own your quirks. And know that you are just as perfect as anyone else, exactly as you are.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes – or just by staring into space.

I’m selfish.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It’s a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That’s why I need to throw curve balls.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

The reason I became 297 pounds is because that was comfortable. What was very uncomfortable was running. What was very uncomfortable was being on a diet. What was very uncomfortable was trying to face things that I didn’t want to face. And I also realized, when I was really big, I had no growth. Why? Because I was living comfortable.

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

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.

‚Victory Lap,‘ even the title. It’s the accumulation of trial and error; that’s what I represent; trial and error.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

I’m addicted to placebos.

Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

I can express myself.

The deferring of anger is the best antidote to anger.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.