The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

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

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

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.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

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

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

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

Lettin‘ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier ‚n puttin‘ it back in.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.