I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

It was a personal decision for me to stand and say that cricket is all I have in life, there’s nothing I need to do other than cricket. If I want to achieve whatever I thought as a kid, I need to work hard and not let it go to waste.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

Music is in my DNA!

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

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.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

I was never really good at anything except for the ability to learn.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

To share the dressing room of club and country with Bhai was an amazing experience. I learnt a lot from him and other senior players like Renedy Singh.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

I began singing in dive bars and really small clubs. I dragged my piano down the stairs, and I went down the street with my keyboard, and I would go to every different dive bar that I could get to agree to let me play. I’d call and pretend I was Lady Gaga’s manager.