One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

All men are equal before fish.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don’t. I really don’t. Look, if you’re a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. If you’re not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

It is natural to die as to be born.

A fool is wise in his eyes.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got 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.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

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

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.