All of us are much more human than otherwise

Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those whom I love or refuse to love.

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.

We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.

If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate.

As you love yourself, so shall you love others. Strange but true, with no exceptions.

It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is 'useful;' but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.

If you do not feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know.

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.

The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them.

Expression is saying what you wish to say, Impression is saying what others wish to hear.

Most closed heavens for the Christian are between his ears. Believing a lie empowers the liar.

Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn't matter, was Rose's Diary. It Mattered.

Nobody can pretend to know what people want to read or hear or see. People rarely know it themselves; they only know it after the fact.

The process of developing superior strategies is part planning, part trail and error, until you hit upon something that works.

The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.

The only shortage we have today is the shortage we have between our own two ears.

Life begins only when we cross the borders and not definitely before!

Ellington is a writer and arranger, as well as a musician and leader. He does movie sound tracks.

Even though people say Richard Harris and I have been having a great feud, it's not true.