The more intense the pain—and the more aggressively you move into it—the more energy you’ll create.

Higher forces must be experienced directly, and that takes effort. That means you'll face the same stark choice I did: demand proof that you'll never receive, or use the tools in the face of your doubts. When I stopped thinking and focused on the tools, my reward was life changing faith.

It’s a paradox; only when you desire fear, will you be able to take action in its presence—which is what courage consists of.

Fear is almost always linked to an image you have of something terrible happening in the future. To develop courage, you have to give up this illusion of future certainty.

There’s a hidden, inner strength that you cannot find unless you push yourself through adversity.

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too … raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

The Comfort Zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.

A few rare individuals refuse to live limited lives. They drive through tremendous amounts of pain—from rejections and failures to shorter moments of embarrassment and anxiety. They also handle the small, tedious pain required for personal discipline, forcing themselves to do things we all know we should do.

Most of us choose avoidance instead. As a result, we don’t live up to our potential, never becoming fully ourselves.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

Where men or nations have broken down, it will almost invariably be found that neglect of little things was the rock on which they split.

I think the bar is higher these days in terms of audience expectations of authenticity.

I was told I would never make it because I'm too short. Well, I'm still too short. It doesn't matter what your height is, it's what's in your heart.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

There's always going to be dreams and goals I have, but I never really tell people what they are.

If I do find myself walking up the aisle and dancing at my own wedding reception, I want the first dance to be both spontaneous and dramatic.

All ballet galas are unbearable but theyre unbearable in different ways.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

When I put something on, and I stand up much straighter, that's when I love to wear clothes.

With unemployment still abysmally high, the Obama economy is crushing Hispanics' dreams for their children to live a better life.

I get my gossip from 'Nashville' on ABC.

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

Anytime we make additional investment in a coal plant, we are really challenging whether that investment is economic.

Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked nor that it will not open with the right heart call or touch.

It's okay to laugh in the bedroom so long as you don't point.

Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.

I must confess... I don't know any tongue but the Nether-Dutch.

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

Hollywood loves to typecast, and I guess they saw me as a violent guy.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

Trouble often begins when we involve ourselves in other people's business.

So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.