Farewell, fair cruelty.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

Football is a sad game.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

I searched for years I found no love. I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

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.

Yes, it is one of my ultimate aims – it is the ultimate sense of football: to make the people happy, to let them live some emotions that you usually can’t get.

Whatever I’m feeling, whatever I’m going through, whatever mood I’m in… If I’m feeling like dancing or clubbing, then it will be reflected in the music. If I’m feeling dark and vulnerable, then it will reflect in the music, too.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Hatred is settled anger.

I think I have the nicest fans in the world, and I quite like being surrounded by people if we’re all feeling the same emotion in the same room.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

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.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

All you need is love.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hate a man for being a friend to her.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

People are underestimating the force of angry kids.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I never fall in love.

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.

Acting is happy agony.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

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

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.