Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

I was impressed with what someone like Karl Lagerfeld built and did and the house that he made, but there was never really a female figure I wanted to emulate.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Imagination rules the world.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

I definitely don’t think that money can buy you love. It can buy you affection but certainly not love.

My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.

Our brand of democracy is hard. But I can promise that a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I’ll be right there with you as a citizen – inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

My drive is other people’s success.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

I was very worried about my mother, growing up – a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me.

Love is an interesting thing.

The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

To be able to throw one’s self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman’s smile – that is happiness.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it’s as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

I’m all about peace. I’m all about unity. I’m all about love.

Some people love so hard that they can’t control those emotions when they’re at their deepest point.

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

My wife has about everything I can think of.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.

Our love, our gratitude, our admiration for our men and women in uniform, our veterans and their families – all of that is bigger than any one party or any one election.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.