As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

I think the perfection of love is that it’s not perfect.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, ‚You know, there’s no sound in outer space.‘

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

Fear is real, but so is love.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

Not always actions show the man; we find who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Love is a serious mental disease.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

All you need is love.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

I never fall in love.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I’d rather tell you how I really feel.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

It’s probably the worst feeling in the world, when you’re deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she’s not feeling you the same way, and you don’t know why.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

One of the most terrible feelings in the world is knowing that someone else doesn’t like you. Especially when you don’t know what you’ve done to deserve it.