Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

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

We’re a blip in the existence of the universe, and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Personally, I don’t wear fur.

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

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

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

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

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

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

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.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Money can’t buy life.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

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

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

I’ve watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it’s because they tend to believe all the hype that’s out there. I don’t think there’s that much hype about me.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.