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

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.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

A letter does not blush.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

I love singing. I love it, and it doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s an expression.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

Nothing can come of nothing.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Truth is a pathless land.