Young people can create beautiful things.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

What is a fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

I know how to swim through backlash. I can tread water through backlash… If anything, that’s all giving me power.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

It’s like a jar of salad dressing sitting on a shelf… most of the seasoning settles to the bottom of the bottle. But when you shake that bottle up, all the ingredients mix together and then the dressing can add flavor to a salad. In the same way, we can stir ourselves up and regain the reverence, respect and awe we once had for the Lord.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Be the hunter, not the hunted.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

I very rarely watch my own fashion shows, but the makeup for my Fall 2011 show was just brilliant.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

The people themselves, and not their servants, can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Anyone can be a Superman, but nobody can be Jackie Chan.

Everybody has a purpose.

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

I always knew that St. Jude was an amazing organization but meeting the kids and seeing how the hospital works first hand was truly beautiful. It doesn’t feel like a regular hospital all dreary and sad. It’s a colorful, beautiful, comfortable, fun place to live and the energy is wonderful.