I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Life is grim, and we don’t have to be grim all the time.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

I am not saying I am the best manager in the world. But I’m quite good.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.

I tend to overthink things. I’m not the guy who screams ‚This is a world smash!‘ when I finish a song.

I have no delusions about my likability in every scenario. I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They’re only powerful when you got your back turned.

This is not a bad life.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

The problem with me, as far as getting married and having a family, is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

I will never say something I don’t agree with or believe in… even if the reward is massive!

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

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.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.

We are wiser than we know.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

I don’t consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.