“If you’re able to be yourself, then you have no competition. All you have to do is get closer and closer to that essence.”

On Saturday afternoons, there was a film, of course, and then we did about four shows between the films. And I would do a tap dance, a little military tap.

The place that seems most dangerous is exactly where safety lies.

New Year’s Eve, we’re going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section.

I have absolutely no desire and no thought of quitting ever.

Young people who are just starting out somehow need to let you know they know how to sing.

I sang for my family. And I think probably the first time I sang and got paid for it, I was about 6 or 7.

The world wants us to be who we truly are, not who we think others want us to be.

If you’re happy, you eat. If you’re sad, you eat. You lose a job, you eat. You get a job, you eat. It’s, you know, it’s addiction.

Even within the last three or four years, I have a greater ability to communicate, I think. I have more courage to show the stuff… And it does take courage.

What actors need to do is to find a way to show people their despair, their joy, their pain, their exhilaration. All of these deep, deep emotional things – good and bad – so that if you’re able to do that, then there’s a kind of resonance that happens.

I look back at photographs and I remember at the time I thought I was not very attractive.

An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.

Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.

They tend to make us meaner rather than better human beings, less sensitive to the demands of justice, compassion and fellow humanity in our times.

Only when the pursuit ceases, is it possible to recognize what comprises you: pure being.

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

There is profound responsibility in being Love… more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they’d be crushed by the realization of it.

In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.