If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

The honor of a nation is its life.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Life is precious.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Information is not knowledge.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

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

All good art is an indiscretion.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Obedience to God is the pathway to the life you really want to live.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

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

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

Children make your life important.

I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba – ‚Lana Del Rey‘ reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.