Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

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.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

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

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

I don’t see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

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.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

With all due respect, I am against dumb.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.