People take the little bit of information they’re fed, and they draw a picture of who you are. Most of the time, it’s wrong.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

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.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

When everybody looks at our generation of kids, they always call us the misfits – you know, like we just don’t give a damn.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Men don’t really like skinny, do they?

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

I’ve never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a ‚fat cat‘ and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a ‚public-spirited philanthropist‘.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

The French complain of everything, and always.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.