It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

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

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Every loss of life is terrible.

Money can’t buy life.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.