My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

I used to wonder if it was God’s plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It’s a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That’s why I need to throw curve balls.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

You need to understand what works best for your own body.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.

Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

All of our problems start in our minds.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

I guess I’m living in the present more than the past.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we’ve made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.