We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Well, it’s looks like I’ve a love-hate thing going on with Monaco.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

I’m very sensitive. I remember, as a kid at school, if someone in the classroom was sad or angry, it could have a great impact on me.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

Anything I’ve ever said, I certainly was feeling at the time.

See any detour as an opportunity to experience new things.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

A relationship can give you a gut wrenching feeling sometimes. It’s a real emotional ride.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don’t have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

We all have two lives: an inner life and an outer life. Your inner life is your soul life, which includes your mind, will and emotions. Your outer life is your physical life. And while God cares about every detail of your life, He is more concerned with your inner life than your outer life.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

There are always people always asking you for something. But I feel like I have a foundation. I have a supporting cast where it doesn’t bother me too much.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.