Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

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.

I’ve been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It’s a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

In oratory the will must predominate.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

God does not play dice.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

I wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Theology is unnecessary.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

Whoever the coach is, my job is to talk to him, understand him and be a better player under him and give my best.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.