We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

So while an incredible amount of progress has been made, on this fifth anniversary, I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you – and fight alongside you – until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back, all the way.

When I ask OGs why there’s so much division in the streets, nobody never really knows. But you know one thing that everybody always mention? A woman.

It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

It sometimes makes people feel better about themselves, you know, to put other people down, or make fun of them, or maybe make mockery of their work and that doesn’t make me feel good at all.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

As unique as we all are, an awful lot of us want the same things. We want to shake up our current less-than-fulfilling lives. We want to be happier, more loving, forgiving and connected with the people around us.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

At the end of the day, your fans are the people who support you in and out. And their opinions matter.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

We must have government that builds stamina into communities and men. That makes men instead of mendicants.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

I think ‚Dirty Harry‘ was probably sensitive toward the victims of violent crime.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God – if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That’s what I think.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

There have been times that I’ve wept as I’ve gone from city to city and I’ve seen how far people have wandered from God.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I don’t even call them fans. I don’t like that. They’re literally just a part of my life; they’re a part of my family. I don’t think of them as on a lower level than me. I don’t think I’m anything but equal to all of them. So yeah, they’re basically all of my siblings.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Being a good listener is absolutely critical to being a good leader; you have to listen to the people who are on the front line.

If anything, we should feel sorry for the people who want us to feel bad about ourselves, because they are the ones struggling for approval. In middle school, bullies tortured other kids because they thought it would make people like them more.

I think what we’ve found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we’re really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.