Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

I have never changed my message. I preach the Bible, and I preach it with authority.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

I’ve been known to preach.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Nothing can affect my voice, it’s so bad.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

You should not believe your conscience and your feelings more than the word which the Lord who receives sinners preaches to you.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

I don’t believe in the war god of the Israelites. He’s a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

I believe that some of us who were kept by God a long while before we found Him love Him better perhaps than we should have done if we had received Him directly, and we can preach better to others – we can speak more of His loving-kindness and tender mercy.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.