So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

Without Cambodia, I may never have become a mother. Part of my heart is and will always be in this country. And part of this country is always with me: Maddox.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

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

A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

Everybody is entertained to death.

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

My music is a luxury.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

All you need to do to be my friend is like me.

To add value to others, one must first value others.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

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.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

Life is a song to me.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

People have me pinned as a shark or a predator in some way, and in no way am I that. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. I want to defend people. I want to help people.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I’m the king of the anthems.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.