In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Art is the proper task of life.

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

A worthy woman personifies the truly noble and worthwhile attributes of life.

I’ve noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I’m not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

The way to know life is to love many things.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Every loss of life is terrible.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

The success I have achieved in bodybuilding, motion pictures, and business would not have been possible without the generosity of the American people and the freedom here to pursue your dreams.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution – this revolution – is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

Without discipline, there’s no life at all.

Don’t run if you can walk. Don’t walk if you can stand. Don’t stand if you can sit. Don’t sit if you can lie down.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Ageing’s alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

The only length of life that seems to satisfy the longings of the human heart is life everlasting.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

I can express myself.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.