There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

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.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

It doesn’t take much to make me angry.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

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.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just demand more of life than what is happening in the moment. Sometimes this is a great mistake, as it’s always a good deal different than you expect it.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

Eternal principles that govern happiness apply equally to all.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Humble people ask for help.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.

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

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.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

I can be a cruel person.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?