Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

I think our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted. It means engaging with the world from a place of vulnerability and worthiness.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

If you judge, investigate.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

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

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‚What is the scientific status of the claims?‘ ‚What social or ideological needs do they serve?‘

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

I am rather inclined to silence.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

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

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

You cannot step into the same river twice.