Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

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.

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

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

The most successful detectives owe their success to noticing small signs. Scouts are natural detectives and never let the smallest detail escape them. These small things are called by Scouts ‚Sign.‘

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The worst men often give the best advice.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

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

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

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.

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

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

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.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness – that there is something wrong.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

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

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty… it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

Wonder is the basis of worship.