A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

I could give a flying flip about doing promo because, no disrespect, nobody put me in the position that I’m in.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

As a bull market turns into a bear market, the new pros turn into optimists, hoping and praying the bear market will become a bull and save them. But as the market remains bearish, the optimists become pessimists, quit the profession, and return to their day jobs. This is when the real professional investors re-enter the market.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Hope is favorable and confident expectation; it’s an expectant attitude that something good is going to happen and things will work out, no matter what situation we’re facing.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Little things affect little minds.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.

When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.