Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

You can’t do something forever.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

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

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

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

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

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

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

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.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren’t able to live in the place you called home.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn’t starving; I was going to eat the next day.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

Life is a lively process of becoming.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.