When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

The vibe on ‚Starboy‘ comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

I’m a people pleaser. I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse.

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I’ve always been a tennis fan.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

I remember when my mother, Shyamala Harris, bought our first home. I was thirteen. She was so proud, and my sister and I were so excited. Millions of Americans know that feeling of walking through the front door of their own home for the first time – the feeling of reaching for opportunity and finding it.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

All art is but imitation of nature.