My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality – it connects you to reality.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don’t see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the – to the back!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.

Wanting to feel good is synonymous with wanting to feel God.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

While discipline and freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The best way to know God is to love many things.

My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

If I had remained in Lhasa, even without the Chinese occupation, I would probably have carried the ceremonial role in some orthodox way.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

They say miracles are past.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

To be treated well in places where you don’t expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, that can’t be a bad thing.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

If I’d known how much packing I’d have to do, I’d have run again.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn’t feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.