I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

A man makes you feel important – makes you glad you are a woman.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

The way to know life is to love many things.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

The artist part of me always wants to be appreciated. I read every review. But I never wanted to seek validation by awards or anything controlled by politics.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‚I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.‘ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

Radio in England is nonexistent. It’s very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

Tell your wife often how terrific she looks.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

Look folks, we know who built this country and we know who is going to rebuild it. It’s you. Instead of vilifying you, we should be thanking you. We owe you.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

I think I’ve committed the one really bad English crime, which is I’ve risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I’m claiming that I’m an artist of some kind.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

It’s cool to be recognised by your peers.

The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.