I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

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.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.

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

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

When I was younger, I felt pressure to become someone else once I became successful.

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

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

All I’m for is the liberty of the individual.

Lots of young players have triumphed at United, so why can’t it happen to me? I’m not worried I’m young – it’s an incentive to do the best I can.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Children are all foreigners.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

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.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

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.

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

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

In past generations, people would try to play younger than they really are. My trick is, I don’t try to play younger than I really am.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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