It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

A celebrated people lose dignity upon a closer view.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Reality is a sliding door.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.