The doors of wisdom are never shut.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

I hope my story inspires everyone out there to keep hustling and chasing their dreams.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‚Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do‘.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

People always say that you can’t please everybody. I think that’s a cop-out. Why not attempt it? ‚Cause think of all the people you will please if you try.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.

When I checked into SEAL Team One many years ago, one of the things that I noticed was there was this old guy, who was younger than I am today, who I decided that I was going to be like. I wanted to emulate what he was doing, and one of those things was he got to work before anybody else.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Nothing endures but change.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.