I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

Smiles are the language of love.

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.

There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‚Everlong‘ is on it, or ‚Best of You‘ is on it, and it’s really special.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that’s worthwhile, that they’re going to be proud to show to friends and family.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

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.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

In a democracy, the well-being, individuality and happiness of every citizen is important for the overall prosperity, peace and happiness of the nation.

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.

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.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

You always want your people to be proud of what you have accomplished.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

My brother had written ‚Ocean Eyes,‘ and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.

People say I look so happy – and I say, ‚That’s the Botox.‘

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.