“If you don’t respect yourself, don’t expect others to respect you.”

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

My dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won’t say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.

Boredom is a very self-conscious emotion by definition. Interest is not. So you can actually be completely absorbed in something and, at certain points in your development, not even realize that you’re into it.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self… When acting, you’re someone else.