The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

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.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

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.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

The world has not yet reached the point which, in my view, is an essential condition for the survival of our human species: access by all the peoples to the material resources of this planet.

History is more or less bunk.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

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

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

It’s a funny old world.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

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

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.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.