It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

Everybody has a purpose.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to ‚believe in God‘ and ‚don’t give up‘ to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can’t call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

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

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Energy begets energy.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

If I inspire you, pay for it, period.

I believe with all my heart that America remains ‚the great idea‘ that inspires the world. It is a privilege to be born here. It is an honor to become a citizen here. It is a gift to raise your family here, to vote here, and to live here.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

The ‚Maddox Jolie-Pitt‘ Foundation’s work is inspired by our children and their connections to particular countries.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

All I ever wanted to do with my life was own a little house. I did that way back with ‚Rocky,‘ so now everything I do is just icing on the cake.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.

I want to be an Asian Robert De Niro.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust – or less than dust – in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

There is spontaneity to my work.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.