From wonder into wonder existence opens.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

It’s a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I’m just a kid that defied the odds. I’m just a kid that ignored the doubt. I’m just a kid from a little place in Dublin, Ireland, that went all the way, and I’m going to continue to go all the way.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

It is natural to die as to be born.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

What is past is prologue.

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

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

There is nothing so stable as change.

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

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

There is spontaneity to my work.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Nature abhors annihilation.

With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It’s made up of pioneers, the beginners. That’s where the action is.