If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

We work to become, not to acquire.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Energy begets energy.

The big message of gospel is that you don’t have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

What one has, one ought to use: and whatever he does he should do with all his might.

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

I wanted to use my fame and this face that everyone knows so well to help uplift and inspire people around the world.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

We never fail when we try to do our duty, we always fail when we neglect to do it.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

We’re constantly striving for success, fame and comfort when all we really need to be happy is someone or some thing to be enthusiastic about.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Sure it’s a big job; but I don’t know anyone who can do it better than I can.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologize.

I don’t like looking back. I’m always constantly looking forward. I’m not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I’m too busy looking for the next cow.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

You have to be someone.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

My success rate speaks for itself.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.