“Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.

Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run- in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.

We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents…Sometimes the ‘unfinisheds’ are among the most beautiful symphonies.

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation

It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’

The more one forgives himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

Man can only find meaning for his existence in something outside himself.

It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.

If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

The third level of wanting is “I commit to being rich.” The definition of the word commit is to “devote oneself unreservedly.” This means holding absolutely nothing back; giving 100 percent of everything you’ve got to achieving wealth.

I’ve never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there’s just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.

If there is a supreme being, he’s crazy.

I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

People won’t want powers being handed back from bureaucrats in Brussels to be given to bureaucrats in Britain.