I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Everybody has a purpose.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

You practice mindfulness, on the one hand, to be calm and peaceful. On the other hand, as you practice mindfulness and live a life of peace, you inspire hope for a future of peace.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I’m sure a lot of people out there make mistakes.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North – that’s our highway – there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I’d be like, that’s what my house is going to look like when I get older. I’m going to start making my house look like this.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‚evolver,‘ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

Water is the driving force of all nature.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

To be successful, a woman has to be much better at her job than a man.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

I gather from motivation around me – from a lot of personalities who have done well in their respective fields.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

I will never retire unless I have to.

When I did A Soldier’s Story, I was very young and green and thought I knew everything-now I know I know everything!

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

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.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

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.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.

Many times, we miss out on God’s best because we give up too soon. We don’t realize how close we are to victory.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

I really want a movie made on Sachin Tendulkar’s life. That is something I’m looking forward to. There will be so much emotion to that movie.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.