No man was ever wise by chance.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Law is mind without reason.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

To be is to do.

The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

Time stays, we go.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.