Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

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.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Nature does nothing in vain.

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

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

When your mother asks, ‚Do you want a piece of advice?‘ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

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

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

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.

I like it when someone tells me ‚I don’t agree.‘ This is a true collaborator. When they say ‚Oh, how great, how great, how great,‘ that’s not useful.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

What you guys want, I’m for.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

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