First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

The good is the beautiful.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

The sun is gone, but I have a light.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

Surely wisdom will come as we listen to learn from children, parents, partners, neighbors, Church leaders, and the Lord.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

The ‚Maddox Jolie-Pitt‘ Foundation’s work is inspired by our children and their connections to particular countries.

People want to feel hopeful.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

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.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

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

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.