Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

‚Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

I searched for years I found no love. I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

There are certain nights you and your image just aren’t in the same bed.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

You just have to have a simple faith.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

Simplify, simplify.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.