There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

When it comes to gossip, I have to readily admit men are as guilty as women.

I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

Life is our dictionary.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

On a spiritual level, it’s as though with my sighted eye I see what’s before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what’s hidden. It’s illuminated life more than darkened it.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

The unnatural, that too is natural.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

A person hears only what they understand.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

If you’re yelling you’re the one who’s lost control of the conversation.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

There’s no formula.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.