Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?

All existing things are really one. We regard those that are beautiful and rare as valuable, and those that are ugly as foul and rotten The foul and rotten may come to be transformed into what is rare and valuable, and the rare and valuable into what is foul and rotten.

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.

Life comes from the earth and life returns to the earth.

Those who realize their folly are not true fools.

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.

I went to the U.S. for business because I thought America is a big consuming country, although it’s not an overconsuming country.

In the ’80s and ’90s, China went through a giant change. It needed all resources. At the time, I was in the recycled paper business, and I realized the China market was a blank slate.

Waste paper is like a forest – paper recycles itself, generation after generation.

Some day, I’d like to be known as the queen of containerboards.

My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.

You can say whatever you want about me, I’m not really bothered. But when it starts to upset people I care about or I hear about it from my mum, then that’s a problem.

I think people I’m close to find it absolutely crazy that I’m famous.

Whenever anything went wrong at home, because I was the only boy, I would get blamed for it straight away. Girls stick together.

I’ve got three sisters, five aunties, and my mom. It must have had an influence on me growing up.

I just love comic books. I’ve always loved comic book art, and I just think it’s amazing.

When we were in Sweden, there was a fan that hid in a bin. I think one of the security guards saw and tried to take her out, and she went a bit crazy and started tackling them.

I’m kind of like a bit of everything wrapped into one.

Honestly, like, American football is not that big over in the U.K., so we hadn’t really heard of Drew Brees before. I did know that he was, like, a massive football player. He’s a massive star, so I was still a little bit anxious and nervous to meet him.

I’d call myself the mediator. I kind of just float around and do my own thing. I’m kind of chilled out, laid back.

I consider myself very lucky, essentially – I was put into a pop group even though my musical taste was very niche before.

It’s nice to look out and see your family supporting you.

I am a bit of a bad boy. I have tattoos and I mess around. That’s part of my image, so it’s cool.

Everything is very black and white for me. I don’t really like playing mind games.

Some girls like to say one thing and mean another. And me being who I am, I’m very straightforward.

I believe that your religion should be between you and whoever your belief is in.

We needed to make a sound that’s not gonna fit in with everything else – we wanted to make something that was completely unique and individual to us. We spent a lot of time trying to make a sound that was a One Direction sound. At first it was quite hard to do that, but I’m really happy with the sound.

I’m always drawing, so Draw Something is a cool game to play against your friends when you’re bored and sat chilling out and relaxing.

I love samosas filled with mincemeat. My mum makes really great ones.

Our parents are obviously proud, but they’re still trying to get used to the fact that we’re in a band. I have a feeling my mom would actually like One Direction if I wasn’t in it!

When we were on ‘The X Factor,’ we didn’t realize how overnight the fame thing was. We didn’t really understand it until we went on a shopping trip. It was like Week 7 or 8 of the show. We went with a few other contestants and there were loads of people, packed.

Now that we have a bit of money, it is nice to get gifts for people. Before I was getting and not really giving.

Some girls like to say one thing and mean another. And me being who I am, I’m very straightforward. Everything is very black and white for me. I don’t really like playing mind games.

It’s pretty strange because you have images of people in your head when you left, then you just think they’re going to be the same when you come back, like time freezes. I have sisters and from the ages of 11 to 13 – it’s a big change for girls.

I do feel like I’ve missed out a bit because I was really close with my sisters when I was at home. It must be weird for them but they cope really well.

When people are putting pressure on me I just completely ignore it.

One Direction is the main thing I’m doing and I’m 100 per cent dedicated to the group.

I’m not one to get involved with what anyone says about me.

Two years ago, if anyone had told me I’d be doing half the stuff I’m doing, I wouldn’t have believed it.

I’m a massive fan of Drake, and we walked right past him. He’s too cool to be clapping One Direction though.

I like the term ‘misunderstood.’ But I am a bit of a bad boy.

We didn’t really expect to achieve anything outside of the UK, and it just went crazy. It’s just crazy that people know our music. We’re just humbled by it.

I’m a couch potato. I love to stay in and just watch a DVD with the missus. Or we all go over to Louis’s house and watch ‘X Factor.’

If you meet a girl, you meet a girl. It’s normal, so if you exchange numbers, whatevs, it’s cool.

The reason I don’t tweet as much as I used to, is because I’m sick of all the useless opinions and hate that I get daily. Goodbye Twitter.

I was a bit of a handful when I was a kid because I was quite hyperactive. Even in the house my mum used to put me in my pram because I was so full-on.

English writing tends to fall into two categories – the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there’s definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That’s a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it’s not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.

I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don’t, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It’s not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that.

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts.

I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

You can’t state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18.

I’m never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.

I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

Can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

I can’t add. I don’t understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I’ve always been able to, and I’ve always liked to. Even if I didn’t understand it, I liked to.

I love to dance, and sing – in the shower, not in public. I’m too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing – dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I’m thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I’ve come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is ‘faith.’

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

When I think of the books I love, there’s always a little laughter in the dark.

I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

That’s the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain – they cannot be otherwise.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can’t be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

I wrote ‘White Teeth’ in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they’re not interested, because it’s also a country where everybody’s opinion is their opinion, and they really don’t give a damn what you think. So it’s a very odd experience.

I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you’re made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.

All my books are made up of other books. They’re all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn’t have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people’s novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life.

If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage.

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road – you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it?’

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Don’t we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

I lost many literary battles the day I read ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’ I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

I just realized quite early on that I’m not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don’t write unless I really feel I need to, and that’s a luxury.

If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they’re about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that’s really a competition with myself. I’ve noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don’t really want to do anything. I can’t think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

I’m always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.

When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.

It’s a funny thing about rap, that when you say ‘I’ into the microphone, it’s like a public confession. It’s very strange.

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you’re an artist who’s making something which isn’t how its mainstream appearance should be, there’s always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be ‘real’ as a rapper.

There’s constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

If you’re going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.

Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

One thing you can’t intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the ‘search for identity’, and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.

I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

It’s difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity… that’s the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren’t given equality of opportunity.

People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it’s over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there’s no down time.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don’t always use it well.

You know, you don’t expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives.

Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother’s a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy – it’s not an affectation. It’s also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

I just can’t get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people’s minds. I can’t live my life like that. And it’s just anathema to being a writer. It’s not healthy.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don’t make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

It’s difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.

We didn’t shoot in 3-D. They’ve talked about doing a conversion and there’s been a lot of talk about us doing ‘Sucker Punch’ in 3-D, but I’m still waiting to see.

We’ve tried to make a Superman movie where he does stuff and you go, ‘Yeah, if I was Superman, that’s what I’d do.’ Even though he’s an alien, he’s more relatable, more human.

Twenty years ago my parents wouldn’t know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have ‘Watchmen’ with a Superman character who doesn’t want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.

He’s this amazing ambassador for all superheroes. What we’ve made as a film not only examines that but is also an amazing adventure story. It’s been an honor to work on. As a comic book fan, Superman is like the Rosetta Stone of all superheroes.

Music has that ability to be a magical thing, and I was like, maybe music is the vehicle that transports us to that other world.

I mean, it’s weird because people lately have been coming up to me and going, ‘Oh, my God. ‘300’ is huge.’ I’m like, ‘Really? It’s not done yet!’

It’s more like Christmas, you know, when you get a shot in that looks great and it’s exactly what you want. It’s a great feeling, and there’s nothing like it.

I think that, for me, Superman just seemed to make a lot of sense to me. After doing ‘Watchmen,’ it was – you know that thing, you’ve got to know the rules before you can break them? There was something about that in making ‘Watchmen.’

Our plans for ‘Superman?’ I can’t say. This is the most super secret thing ever. It’s like working for the government, like I’m on a covert mission.

To go back, the mistake that Universal Studios made with ‘Dawn of the Dead’ was that they didn’t have enough money or cared enough to make a soundtrack.

There’s very few dork movies made by dorks.

Origin stories are really important to me. I just like that sort of stuff and I feel like it makes a lot of sense to the guys, who they are. If you don’t have that stuff, it’s kind of a one dimensional version of it.

We do like digital projection. We like shooting on film, finishing digitally, and projection digitally. That’s what I like best. It’s still a movie. It’s not someone’s camcorder and it got projected. That’s mean, I know.

I mean, like, I can go in a room and say, look, ‘Watchmen’ should be at least 15 minutes longer than ‘Batman.’ I mean, that’s, like, any geek will tell you that.

It’s interesting now that basically a CG set is the same cost as a real set. So like if you’re going to build a CG house in the suburbs, it costs you $200,000. And if you were going to build it in a computer, it’ll cost you $200,000. It’s the same… the relationship is exactly the same.

I’m interested in animation. I actually feel like I’ve learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

The thing about ‘Dark Knight’ is its objective is to set Batman into your world, so that you can imagine the moral dilemmas he faces are exactly parallel to moral dilemmas that you would face in this world, today, if you were out there fighting crime dressed like a bat.

I think I just have a natural operatic aesthetic. I can’t help it.

I always say, I’m certain I changed ‘Watchmen’ less than the Coen brothers changed ‘No Country for Old Men.’ I’m certain of it. But you don’t hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It’s like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

You know, it’s a hugely difficult thing to take any work of art or drawing and say ‘make that real.’

One of the things I think is important about ‘Watchmen’ is that it have resonance within cinematic pop culture as well as superhero culture.

I heard one time that the Superman glyph is the second or third most recognizable symbol on Earth after the Christian cross.

We tried to approach this as though there’s never been a Superman movie before, but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology. There are the pillars that you have to respect, and I’m not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

When I make a live-action movie, it’s a very physical process. It’s like running a marathon.

Of course it would depend on the project, but I don’t think I could ever separate myself from my aesthetic.

People always come up to me now and say, ‘Watchmen’ is the best superhero movie ever made.’ I’m always saying ‘That’s super cool. That’s nice of you to say.’ But it happens now, more and more and more than it did when it first came out.

The challenge with ‘Watchmen’ is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It’s one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

I understand the rules of Superman – not necessarily better than anyone else – but better than a normal filmmaker would. After doing ‘Watchmen’ and digging that deep into the why of superheroes, when Superman is presented to you, I felt like I was in a unique position to say ‘I get this guy. I know what this is.’

I believe that pop culture is just, like, so ready for ‘Watchmen.’ We tried so hard to ride that wave between satire and reality, and all the things that make you still care about the character, but you don’t miss the commentary about them.

The difference between ‘Watchmen’ and a normal comic book is this: With ‘Batman’s Gotham City,’ you are transported to another world where that superhero makes sense; ‘Watchmen’ comes at it in a different way, it almost superimposes its heroes on your world, which then changes how you view your world through its prism.

‘Watchmen’ is like the music you feel is written just for you. ‘That’s my song, no one else gets that but me.’ That’s why the fan base is so rabid, because they feel personal about it.

My mom always encouraged me, it was never weird. She’d look at ‘Heavy Metal’ and go ‘Woo-hoo!’

The eyes get lost in 3-D. With 3-D, your eyes are looking for the plane of focus, right? And the problem is, when you do quick cuts, your eyes can’t find it.

The problem is, when you’re making an animated movie, the studio has an illusion in their minds – and it’s really not true – that because it’s a drawing, it can be changed at any time.

I love the irony of movies. I really do. For whatever reason, I’m incredibly intrigued by the irony of reality in a motion picture.

The thing about owls is that they do sort of have this facial disc, which is unlike any other bird. They kind of have a face, more than like a dog or a giraffe. They have this weird, alien face that you can actually make expressive.

In all disputes between conflicting governments, it is our interest not less than our duty to remain strictly neutral.

In reference to the Army and Navy, lately employed with so much distinction on active service, care shall be taken to insure the highest condition of efficiency; and in furtherance of that object, the Military and Naval Schools, sustained by the liberality of Congress, shall receive the special attention of the Executive.

I congratulate you, my fellow-citizens, upon the high state of prosperity to which the goodness of Divine Providence has conducted our common country.

The appointing power vested in the president imposes delicate and onerous duties. So far as it is possible to be informed, I shall make honesty, capacity, and fidelity indispensable prerequisites to the disposal of office, and the absence of either of these qualities shall be deemed sufficient cause for removal.

As American freemen, we cannot but sympathize in all efforts to extend the blessings of civil and political liberty, but at the same time, we are warned by the admonitions of history and the voice of our own beloved Washington to abstain from entangling alliances with foreign nations.

I hope some compromise will be entered into between the two parties, slavery & antislavery, which will have the effect of allaying violent passions on both sides.

In no case can I permit myself to be a candidate of any party or yield myself to any party schemes.

I will not say I would not serve if the good people were imprudent enough to elect me.

My duty to the army and to the republic whose battles we were waging forbade me assuming a position of seeming hostility to any portion of the brave men under my command.

The idea that I should become president seems to me too visionary to require a serious answer. It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any other person.

Soldiers, I intend to stay here, not only as long as a man remains, but as long as a piece of a man is left.

I did not expect to encounter what has beset me since my elevation to the presidency. God knows, I have endeavored to fulfill what I considered to be an honest duty, but I have been mistaken; my motives have been misconstrued and my feelings grossly betrayed.

For more than a quarter of a century on active duty, my house has been my tent, and my home the battlefield.

My wife was as much of a soldier as I was.

If elected, I would not be the mere president of a party – I would endeavor to act independent of party domination and should feel bound to administer the government untrammeled by party schemes.

The confidence and respect shown by my countrymen in calling me to be the Chief Magistrate of a Republic holding a high rank among the nations of the earth have inspired me with feelings of the most profound gratitude.

As to the Constitution and the Union, I have taken an oath to support the one, and I cannot do so without preserving the other, unless I commit perjury, which I certainly don’t intend to do. We must cherish the Constitution to the last.

I know enough of the family life of officers. I scarcely know my own children or they me.

I have never yet exercised the privilege of voting, but had I been called upon at the last presidential election to do so, I should most certainly have cast my vote for Mr. Clay.

I cannot in any case permit myself to be brought before the people, exclusively, by any of the political parties that now so unfortunately divide our country, as their candidate for office.

Economy I consider a virtue & should be practiced by all; there is certainly no way in which money can be laid out than in the education of children.

It would be judicious to act with magnanimity towards a prostrate foe.

I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

Never judge a stranger by his clothes.

I do believe anybody manufacturing products for healthcare cannot regard it truly as a 100 per cent business: it is business plus a humanitarian approach to society because you are saving lives. You are playing with people’s lives.

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.

If tomorrow the Chinese decide not to supply the world with raw materials, the pharma industry would collapse.

Every country has the right to determine its own laws. And India can’t afford monopolies.

If you look at the world’s top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I’ll pay a royalty. But I shouldn’t be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.

Clinton has played a major role in giving companies like Cipla credibility, for which I will always be grateful.

I believe that life-saving, essential drugs should be freely available and the innovator should be paid a suitable royalty payment for his invention.

I want it to be said when I leave this world that ‘he was not just a money-making machine.’

My father never forced me, but chemistry was my best subject.

Reducing the price of cancer drugs is a humanitarian move.

India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can’t afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can’t allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant.

Reducing the price of AIDS drugs gave me so much satisfaction that I’ve been thinking what else I could do. One day, I thought, ‘Let’s look at cancer and see how we can spare cancer patients’ unnecessary suffering.’

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

Alleviation of suffering is my fundamental principle.

Cipla has already developed a generic version, oseltamivir, which would be much cheaper than Tamiflu, the only available drug effective in treating avian flu.

Unfortunately, the mechanism for doing philanthropy in a structured way isn’t yet in place in India. I already do a fair bit and support various causes such as education, sanitation, health. But selling costly drugs at affordable prices is philanthropy in itself.

As long as I can contribute, I’ll continue working.

Cipla has a strong professional management team, and we take team decisions. My brother has been working at Cipla since 1973.

Patients are becoming aware that they’re being taken for a ride by big pharma companies. They charge high prices and have never cared for India’s healthcare. There are 23 million cases of cancer every year and India has a fair share of that.

I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That’s an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there’s a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it’s not what we know, it’s what we can risk discovering.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I’m uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter – so was my father – and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn’t work against himself.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

I like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it’s like a dialogue.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.

It wasn’t a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing – and loving. Language became an addiction.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one’s personal project.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening.

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can’t aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

I originally wanted to embrace the imagery and forthrightness of rap music. There are some interesting, dynamic voices in rap. But I find most of it irresponsible in its overt violence and commercialization of anger. As artists, we believe we can will action through language. If that’s the case, we have to take responsibility for what we say.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

The Indian music scene is completely dominated by Bollywood music. We need to create space for indi-pop music.

I am either very expensive or free for my friends.

We celebrate Valentine Day, but no one remembers Bhagat Singh birth anniversary.

My songs are based on my keen observation. I have picked these situations from my surrounding and have presented a real situation about the youth and their mindset.

When I composed a song on Bhagat Singh, it flopped. But my other songs about partying and all that are superhits!

Everyone knows it, but no one is willing to digest the fact that the lyrics comprising of slangs can also be a hit among youth.

I don’t understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

No one gave me an opportunity, which I desperately needed in my struggling days. If there is one thing that I have learned during that period is that you need to create an opportunity yourself if you want to live your dream.

Girls have been suppressed for long. Crimes against women are on the rise because women have the courage to come out in the open and fight the perpetrators of these heinous crimes.

I never wanted to be a performer, I never wanted to be , the rock star.

I did one show in Chennai. There was this little kid, dressed up as I dressed in ‘Blue Eyes.’ That’s fame for me.

If you see me as a controversial artist or controversial human being, then I could be cashing in on some reality shows. I am not doing anything like that. That’s not my aim.

Fame, for me, is different. Fame, for me, is not seeing myself on big billboards: it is when I go on a street and people connect to me. If I going to walk on the street, I know I can get 100,000 people following me.

People are wrong when they say that there is struggle in Bollywood. That is only when you don’t have the talent. If you have talent, Bollywood comes to you.

In 2011, I released my first album called ‘International Villager.’ I had no support, and whatever money I had made, I put it all in the album. I shot the music video for ‘Brown Rang’ with one lakh dollars. I spent so much money, as I just wanted to put it up on YouTube, as I knew that my market was there, and it became a huge hit.

I love my mother the most in the world. She has seen a lot of poverty and loneliness and is very simple. Whenever I am in trouble, I go far away from her, as she is not at all strong. If I see her breaking, I break.

I was born in Delhi, have stayed and roamed the world, but had a tough childhood and career path. Only my mom and mausie supported me in music. So, I would just sing shabad kirtan to remain somehow attached to music.

I believe an artiste is a reflection of society. I write what I see. I am not a scholar, I am just an entertainer. I cannot change the way people think.

My dream is to take the Indian independent music scene to an international level. People like Alisha Chinai, Baba Sehgal and Daler Mehndi took it to a very high level. My ultimate target is to win a Grammy. I don’t want to primarily be a Bollywood playback singer.

Nobody can replace Mika Singh; he is an amazing artiste and a legend.

I started as a music director in Punjab and then started singing.

If an offer comes my way, I would love to sing in every Indian language. It will be like an ode to my fans from every corner of the country.

For a Punjabi singer to find acceptance down South is a tall task. I’m glad I earned their love and respect.

All my songs depict a slice of life and how youngsters perceive it. My song ‘Blue Eyes’ is exactly the kind of conversation a 21 or 22-year-old guy will have with the girl he likes.

I feel extremely honoured and humbled that people are showing me so much love. My fans have stood by me through thick and thin, and I think this love is what makes my concerts house-full.

I come from a business family. I rebelled from my father to become a musician.

I’d request politicians to stop diverting attention from the actual issues that affect the country. Please stop resorting to soft targets like singers and musicians as scapegoats.

I’d never disrespect women. I have been brought up to treat women with courtesy and dignity.

I’m sorry, but I am not interested in getting cheap popularity. I’ve earned my success through sincere hard work. And that’s the only success I want.

I am overwhelmed with all the love, affection, and warmth that I have been receiving for ‘Dheere Dheere.’ It is one of my most special works, and I am glad that so many million hearts have taken to it in such a manner.

Even the song that I did for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Gabbar’ is an old number. But working with Mr Bhansali was a dream come true.

I always maintained I’m a good simple boy from Punjab. Some chose not to believe me. Now the same people are happy to work with me.

When I was child, I saw the ‘Ram Leela’ performed on stage. Now there is the film ‘Ram Leela,’ and its maker actually wanted me to do a song for Akshay Kumar in ‘Gabbar.’ Akshay was one of the first Bollywood A-listers to believe in me. We jelled before we jammed together.

We want to take boxing to the level of cricket.

It’s very important to get friends on board, friends who make a difference.

Just as I have broken the monopoly of film music as being synonymous with popular music in our country, I want to prove that cricket is not the only glamorous sport.

There are many wrestlers in my mother’s family. So I guess I’ve inherited my love for wrestling from my mother’s side of the family.

I’d sing for any friend’s happiness. I don’t have to get drunk to do so.

I never do any song with any expectation.

I used to be the occasional social drinker earlier. But now my intake of alcohol has ceased completely. I want to be fighting fit for the boxing ring.

I am excited to partner with American Swan and to be able to connect with the youth and inspire them to chase their dreams and script their destinies.

I thought I was passionate about my work. Then I saw Shah Rukh bhai and Bachchan saab at work. Their spirit was so infectious. I felt I had so far been just fooling around.

I am not anyone’s brother, and I only have one younger sister. I don’t consider my counterpart rappers as my brothers.

I’m working on an international album which will be out soon, and Lollypop is gonna be a part of it. I want to let the world know what happens when a desi song is remixed with Honey Singh’s English Tadka.

After I did ‘Lungi Dance’ with Shah Rukh, I felt I had achieved everything there is to achieve. But then I am getting to work with Amitabh Bachchan now. And it’s really the ultimate Bollywood experience for me. It really can’t get any better for me.

I have fulfilled all my dreams in Bollywood. Now I have to find new dreams for Bollywood before I strike again.

I need to focus on other things before I carry on in Bollywood. I can’t be doing what I’ve done in ‘Lungi Dance’ and now the song ‘Party With Bhootnath’ with Bachchan over and over again. I’ve to reinvent myself for Bollywood.

I compose for very limited people in Bollywood, as I am not a playback artist. I compose my songs and sing them.

I don’t want to work more. I want to do limited but good work.

I don’t consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I’m a music producer, lyricist. I’m a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.

I was never seen with one girl in a video, right? My videos always had many girls.

It was very difficult acting. I feel it is a very tough job to portray someone else’s character and to behave like that on screen.

I am a straight, non-alcoholic, non-partying guy who speaks straight. I have no knowledge of literature. This is my language of communication, and what I see, what I observe, I reflect.

I would never sing a song which I cannot sing in front of my family.

There are many politicians who are from the Congress or the BJP or the Aam Aadmi Party who are all my friends and who are all young politicians between the ages of 27 and 35.

I was looking online; many singers have sung songs for the elections, but I am not doing anything like that.

The guy I played in ‘The Xpose’ is more like a spoiled brat who likes to have his way than a villain. No more negative roles after ‘The Xpose’ for me. I’ve enough problems dealing with the negative image I’ve been saddled with in some sections.

My playground as a musician is growing.

‘The Xpose’ was just an experiment, a small step into Bollywood. It wasn’t my acting debut, as reported in Mumbai. I’ve done a couple of Punjabi films.

Have you driven a Rolls-Royce? There is a difference between a Rolls-Royce and a Nano.

I am glad that my fan believed in me and stood by me in my hard times and continued to enjoy my songs. That’s the real victory for me.

I respect women, and I have not and will never sing anything that will upset my fans.

I am yet to have a child, and if I am blessed with a baby girl, and in future, if a guy tries to impress my daughter by singing my hits, I have no issues with it.

I am not interested to sing in Bollywood. I sing for only those actors whom I admire. I sing free of cost for them. I want to take independent music ahead, and my songs are completely based on my observations.

It’s a misconception that I compose songs for girls. I have sung a song for Bhagat Singh, too, but nobody knows about it. I have sung about boys, but all of them are super-duper flop.

Music industry is a very competitive field, and one has to continuously entertain and excite the audience, which is a difficult task.

It’s never easy for me to say goodbye. I get attached to people very quickly, and with ‘Raw Stars,’ my connection is even more special. I’m in love with their music and perhaps their biggest fan. I think every artiste on the show is mind-blowing.

I’ve seen my family watch TV every day, and they develop a liking for various characters more and more with time. So, I think TV does bring a celeb closer to his fans. I feel I have come closer to people without losing my raw appeal.

TV is the most powerful medium, which has taken me right into the homes of so many people.

I wish to contribute more to south Indian music, especially Tamil music.

Just because I take my music international doesn’t mean I have to sing in English. I will continue to sing in Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, and Tamil. I want to represent my own country through its own languages.

The kind of songs I sing have been existing in Bollywood music since a long time. In fact, the reason my music is so popular amongst the millions of youth is because I sing in their own language, in their own slang, and about their lives.

My family didn’t want me to be a musician, and therefore, they never helped out in my efforts.

I like action-based sports, and kabbadi is my favourite. I wanted to be associated with a sport on which I really believe in, and so I bought a team in World Kabbadi League, and Toronto will host my team.

It is a tough job to portray a character and make it believable on screen.

I had to work on my own to establish myself.

As an entertainer, my first responsibility is to entertain my fans who have made me who I am today. I am not a preacher who can tell youngsters what they should be doing and what they should not be doing. The youth of our country is intelligent enough to know what is good and bad, and my songs can’t change their thinking.

I do not consume alcohol. You won’t find a single picture that shows me drinking.

Writing songs, making music, and singing is important to me, and I do all three.

I think acting is the most difficult one among all the performing arts.

I am happy film stars are singing in their films. I hope to work as a music director for a film where actors will sing all the songs.

When Punjabis all over the world admired my work, there was buzz in Bollywood as well.

I don’t take my work ever for granted. I still work very hard on every song and try to outdo myself every time.

I am overwhelmed for whatever I have achieved so far. I give the credit to my mother and everyone who has helped me.

As an artiste, I believe that I am not my own property. I am the property of my fans.

After ten years of struggle I reached somewhere, and then I see some people pulling me down. I tell myself that if this is what singers have to go through, I would never let my kid enter this field.

I got a lot of support from the entire industry, stars like Akshay Kumar. A. R. Rahman told me to keep doing the good work and not get bogged down by anything.

I didn’t have any singing background. Against the wishes of my parents, I got into making music.

Everything I wear is custom made.

Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.

When some artistes give a hit song, they keep repeating themselves in the same genre. I always try to create something new.

I had cut myself off from everyone. I didn’t come out of my room, forget stepping out of the house. I had a beard, and I didn’t get a haircut for months. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 20,000, I was scared of facing 4-5 people. That’s what bipolar disorder does to you.

The truth is I was suffering from bipolar disorder. It went on for 18 months, during which I changed four doctors, the medication wasn’t working on me, and crazy things were happening.

We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.

Though I am not a chief of state, I must work twice as hard as one because I have to both administer a bureaucracy and run a revolution.

How can I shave in the midst of guerrilla warfare? On battlefields, we have no facilities for shaving, and that was why I first grew my beard.

I assure you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we shall discover ourselves in peace more than we have with war and confrontation, as I am sure that the Israelis, in turn shall find themselves in peace more than they have found it in war.

I would like to congratulate my partners in peace – Mr. Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Mr. Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister – on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

As long as we have decided to coexist in peace, we must do so on a firm basis that will withstand time and for generations.

Confidence alone does not make peace, but acknowledging rights and confidence do. Failure to recognize these rights creates a sense of injustice; it keeps the embers burning under the ashes.

I call on Russia and the United States of America, the cosponsors of the peace conference, to help the peace process take bigger steps by contributing to the process and helping to overcome all obstacles.

I call on all the countries of the world, especially the donor countries, to speed up their contributions so that the Palestinian people may overcome their economic and social problems and proceed with reconstruction and the rebuilding of infrastructures.

We started the peace process on the basis of land for peace and on the basis of U.N. resolution 242 and 338,1 as well as other international decisions on achieving the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.

The Arabs are looking forward to developing their region, which the long years of war had prevented from finding its true place in today’s world, in an atmosphere of democracy, pluralism, and prosperity.

Peace, for us, is an asset and in our interest. It is an absolute human asset that allows an individual to freely develop his individuality unbound by any regional, religious, or ethnic fetters.

The Palestinians, whose national cause guards the gates of Arab-Israeli peace, look forward like their Arab brethren to that comprehensive, just, and lasting peace based on ‘land for peace’ and compliance with international legitimacy and resolutions.

Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.

It’s always convenient for certain people to heap accusations on Israel.

The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine.

The Palestinian Rifle is ready and we will aim it if they try to prevent us from praying in Jerusalem.

Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.

Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis.

In order to obtain the goal of returning to Palestine, all of us sometimes have to grit our teeth.

I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Whoever thinks of stopping the uprising before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.

We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.

Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a terrorist.

This is my homeland no one can kick me out.

Egyptians are quite incredible people. They have everything: the culture, the music, the scenes. So much of Arab music and art started there.

I don’t relate to what is seen as ‘Arab culture.’ I relate to what I explore myself, what is around me.

My family played a part in bringing communism to Lebanon.

I don’t think there is only one Arab culture or a pure Arabness. We are very multiple, especially our generation, which is very multilayered.

I met Jim Jarmusch when I started recording my album ‘Ya Nass.’ He was writing the script for ‘Only Lovers Left Alive.’ Jarmusch was always a great inspiration to me, way before meeting him. Working with him was fantastic.

I love Khaliji music; it’s very inspiring.

I studied psychology at university.

My father is an engineer, and my mother raised the three children.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.

I think our societies – to certain extent, of course, and to different degrees, but almost with no exception – have always been struggling to come to terms with archaic traditions.

I am interested in exploring encounters where worlds meet and not where they separate.

There is something spiritual about art that connects us with ourselves and with others; it’s really about coming together and creating bridges.

As an artist, you need to be true to yourself and free and not put yourself in a box that contradicts with what you feel is needed for a song.

We all have femininity in us.

For me, a taxi is like a public space because so many people get in that space.

When I started doing music, it was out of despair and boredom. I got passionate about it, and I felt that it allowed me to become somebody: an artist who explores her different identities.

I’ve always fought any form of censorship.

Women are a minority the same way gay people are.

‘Al Jamilat’ is not just feminist. It’s an album with songs that feature women: women who are in love, rebellious women, political activists, women who are more submissive, women who are in charge.

If you have a drummer who alternates between fast and slow drumming, it can negatively affect the music.

The Arabic music I listen to is extremely edgy. Ironic, sarcastic, sensual, erotic.

The Arabic world was very interesting in the 1920s to ’60s: there was something booming culturally, and I found my culture very desirable when I listened to these songs.

I had an Arabic background. but I lived a very scattered childhood. I didn’t belong to any one culture, which meant I didn’t have musical geographies in my head.

I’m Muslim but not really. My family did not care. And I always managed to skip religion classes when I was living in the Gulf, even when they were obligatory.

Back in Kuwait, I had started listening to a lot of English language music: western music, I would say – Kate Bush and Radiohead – and I loved Chet Baker, Etna James, a lot of singers and a lot of bands.

Faith is a very intimate process that involves being sincere and truthful to a spiritual presence.

Every time I go to Beirut, I see people and the quality of life going slowly from bad to worse, and from worse to even worse.

You do not start by working on society; you start by yourself to be a freer person and a more independent person.

I had the urge to face my own limitation, and I needed to be bigger. I needed to be more professional and be in a more competitive environment because I wanted to grow as an artist. That’s why I went to Europe.

Change means resistance, and resistance means transformation and igniting energies.

When I go to Beirut, I don’t drive. It’s traumatizing to drive there.

World music can be sometimes like the lumber room in which all the non-English singers are dumped. When you are singing in Arabic, no matter what your style of music or artistic proposition is, you are faced with some of that reality.

When I imagine feminine characters in my songs, they’re often bold, strong, passionate, militant, witty, sensual, dangerous. I see those characters as skillful witnesses, figures of change and awakening.

I have a sense of mission in a way. I’ve always worked on being free, as a woman and as an artist.

I have learned to create from a hybridized point of view. It’s an asset – something rather liberating.

Music liberated me.

I’m bored, normally, when I travel.

There should be no borders, race, colours, or ethnical considerations when it comes to music and creativity.

A lot of Arabic composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab mixed sounds and instruments from all over the world. It’s important to be able to propose new ways and new sounds without being stigmatised, censored or put aside.

It’s interesting to be at once an insider and outsider. It’s a way of learning how to find your way freely without the need of conforming or belonging.

Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.

It’s normal; Arab women have always been very active at the forefront of culture – as film producers since the 1920s; as singers, dancers, choreographers, writers for much longer than that.

Imagine a singer with the virtuosity of Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald, the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the audience of Elvis, and you have Umm Kulthum.

All of the Arabic women I grew up listening to or watching had a very strong character.

Maybe I was blessed that my main drive was purely selfish. I needed to make something, make my life better, wider, have poetry in my life, have something that gives me hope on an everyday basis. That was my main drive all along, really.

With Soapkills, we were lucky. We started at a time of transition where things were not ready, nothing was available.

I always had this crisis: where do I come from? I was never an insider, never an outsider; I was always in the middle. But it means I never have borders in my head.

When I started, I didn’t know how to sing in Arabic – it’s a very complex and sophisticated music full of codes and modes and quarter-tones.

When the public doesn’t understand me, it’s a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

I sing ‘Beirut’ for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

It’s complicated for my music to be accepted, even in Lebanon and the Arabic world – I sing in Arabic, but there’s no lute, no classical instruments. Maybe with the Internet opening things up, things will change.

I sing in Arabic as a statement. It’s art, and it’s a challenge.

I’m inspired by many artists whose language I don’t understand.

I was raised by strong women, and the role models I had in music and cinema were strong, too – liberated and provocative.

I was born in the middle of Lebanon’s civil war.

My dad was a brilliant civil engineer. My parents later divorced, but we lived in Abu Dhabi, Greece, Kuwait.

I’ve always had a sense that I am doing something very important, something vital.

I set the bar very high. I’m very tough on myself.

I wanted to pursue my own thing – I had desires, ideas I wanted to accomplish, and I needed to be on my own for that.

I went from the most underground band in the world to signing with Madonna’s producer and a record label that is extremely mainstream – it was interesting.

I don’t believe that there is a separation between art and political consciousness.

Singing is a very sensual activity! You engage in it with all your senses and your heart.

Without freedom and without humor, our cultures can’t have a healthy evolution.

Collaborating with other artists is an emotional thing. Obviously, you don’t do it unless this person inspires you.

There are many positive values that come with a Muslim upbringing. But when religion becomes about rules and hierarchies, when it starts to feel like a prison, I’m not interested.

When I read the Koran or hear it read, the images and the poetry, the sound of the language is very inspiring.

The Arab world is mediatised in a way that gives too much space to these people – puritans, extremists, whatever you want to call them. There are a lot more people like me in the Middle East than you might think.

I follow my desires, and I’m prepared to take the consequences.

Your child is happy. What else could you want?

We have a saying in France. A dog doesn’t make a cat.

The important thing is staying together if you want to do something special.

It made me hungry. I feel like I’m in a program that really helped me individually as a player. I feel like I’m with a group of guys that are like my best friends.

Being in the stands is very difficult. I was never playing but I am nervous watching, waiting.

I believe in Karma. If the good is sown, the good is collected. When positive things are made, that returns well.

I felt the weight of the past at the beginning of my career of singer.

People judged my work without to have listened to it.

At one time, I was persuaded to want to make music, and people answered me that that was not possible.

Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.

When one sings, one does not speak about the problems of the every day. One speaks about the things which inspire us, which helped us.

Cracked was a very short warrior, whereas Marley was a pacifist warrior.

In black Africa, one does not strike, one does not express, one walks right.

To take part in this brothel through the payment of my taxes, that had become to me unbearable.

I did not support any more New York. I lived 10 years there, and after September 11, I felt very European. I did not share the opinion of people in the street, who were deeply influenced by what they heard in the media.

I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.

You arrive at a village, and in this calm environment, one starts to hear echo.

Downtown, one has less time. But there are in Europe much people who have the faith, in South America, too.

In the villages in Europe, there are still healers who tell stories.

Being an athlete helps me get those grandiose emotions of pleasure and pain that are involved in sports.

There is no gender to my music. There’s no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It’s much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.

With instrumental music, it is traditionally hard to get exposure.

If you are a professional, the speed with which you react to a potential problem separates the men from the boys.

I do listen to a lot of music, but I don’t listen when I’m writing.

A simple life is good with me. I don’t need a whole lot. For me, a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, barefoot on a beach and I’m happy.

My music is based on melody and when I play the piano, it’s as if I’m singing with them. When you try to transform that into a vocal, there was very little adjustment.

I love the road, and I love coming in contact with the fans. They talk to me and that’s irreplaceable. But when I get tired, I head to the studio and I am in there for a long time.

I don’t like to define my music. To me, music is pure emotion. It’s language that can communicate certain emotions and the rhythms cuts across genders, cultures and nationalities. All you need to do is close your eyes and feel those emotions.

When you do music concerts at Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, you have to be careful about your performance being appropriate with the place that surrounds you. It has to be appropriate to the culture – it should fit the building behind you, the environment you are playing it in and the culture of that place.

Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism.

You accomplish what you want to accomplish. I just don’t ever want to hurt anybody doing it.

New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn’t know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.

I just would use any instrument known to man in any combination as long as it describes an emotion.

The good news is when you open up in Vegas, you have a lot of friends, because they all come over to see your opening night.

When it comes down to music, I have no balance. I am 100 percent. It is like full throttle. Five hundred miles an hour.

While most of the music I write is instrumental, I love to use the human voice as another instrument.

I am so happy that I didn’t go to school and I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly. And what you do with music and what is the correct way to write it and what is not the correct way to write it.

Actually, with ‘Truth of Touch’ I wasn’t even intending on making an album. I was just having fun. I had about a six-month period of down time, and I’m not very good at sitting around. So I kind of started going into the studio and having fun with new core mendin sounds.

Creativity is an inherent human quality of the highest order. When we create, we become more than the sum of our parts.

I am so happy that I didn’t go to school and I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly.

And going into my studio at night, particularly at night when everybody’s asleep, is just a total pleasure for me.

When you hear ‘Truth of Touch,’ I believe you recognize that it is me; however it’s not the typical album.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

Truth is the number one element in whatever you do with music.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

It has never been necessary for me to learn how to read music.

I don’t really like to explain my songs.

There are people who get to be three-dimensional humans in the United States, and there are people who do not.

‘Strong Island’ is not your typical true-crime film. It’s not actually about the uncovering of evidence or following leads that hadn’t been seen before or any of that stuff.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

When I was making ‘Strong Island,’ it was very clear to me that my brother’s death was a point on a line that stretched back into the 1940s and beyond in my family – and in the nation.

I have a lot of surrogate parents, but there’s no one like your mother.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I have been gender-nonconforming my entire life.

Instincts are a really important guide for any artist, but particularly filmmakers because it takes a lot to stay true to your instincts as a storyteller.

I don’t think I present as gender-conforming on screen, but some people need a little extra information.

I worked at ‘POV’ for five years before I told one person about my brother.

I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.

I don’t feel like a hero.

My impression is that the Academy is really sincere about moving toward a more inclusive and representative Hollywood.

I’m incredibly proud to be the first trans director to be nominated for an Oscar.

Grief is a very complicated monster. There’s no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.

People come up and say, ‘Thank you’ for showing a black family loving their masculine-presenting child and for undoing the myth of black people as being rabidly homophobic.

I think fear has been racialised. When you get someone who says ‘I was afraid’ of a big black guy, that’s enough to say, ‘Okay, not guilty,’ or, ‘No indictment.’ It’s persisted over generations, and it needs to stop.

Everyone in the street where I grew up was given the same message: You can be anything; you can do anything. That wasn’t extraordinary; that was ordinary for us. My folks didn’t believe in black exceptionalism. There’s nothing exceptional about ‘You can have that, too’ – except when it comes to justice. You can’t have that.

My brother’s death picked up my life and put it down somewhere else. I had an image of myself in my mind as a working artist, and when he died, all of that changed.

It’s important that people understand that ‘Strong Island’ is just as much about this claim of reasonable fear and our need to interrogate reasonable fear as it is about my family’s grief.

I would hate for people to think that ‘Strong Island’ is just about a family’s grief. It is about a family’s grief, yes, but it is also an interrogation of our criminal justice system.

It would be easier for people to grasp that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are different things if we had as much imagination in real life as we do when we are making our movies.

White communities – and I exempt poor white communities from this – have power over their representation. White people have the ability to define themselves, to exert their agency in a way that they get to be believed. No one believes black people. No one. Until a white person vouches for them.

I had a list of 10 rules when we started ‘Strong Island,’ and one of them was, ‘Yance will never appear on camera with sync sound.’

Black lives are too easy to take in America because we don’t want to question why people are so afraid of black and brown people to begin with. And that’s what I want ‘Strong Island’ to do.

The justice system isn’t meant to work for people of color in this country.

‘Strong Island’ is slang for Long Island, New York. And it really grew out of – what may surprise people, it really grew out of the very vibrant hip-hop scene that, you know, is located and still generates artists out of Long Island.

‘Strong Island’ has been a labor of love and dedication on the part of so many people, that it’s just an incredible recognition to be honored. And to be the first trans director – and, I believe, the first African-American trans director – to be nominated for an Academy Award is incredibly, incredibly special to me.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

My father just believed in my mother’s ability to do anything.

Violence against the other, and the way we otherize people out of fear, has to be examined across the board.

What ‘Strong Island’ does is bring a historical perspective and help people understand that what we’re treating as a modern-day phenomenon is actually not modern. It’s actually quite old.

White people get to do that all of the time. They get to engage in bad behavior, even felonious behavior, but they rarely wind up in jail. But as a black person, losing your temper can cost you your life. Or insisting on your rights can cost you your life.

I remind audiences that I’m in the fortunate position to make a film about my family.

Most black families went from the South to the city. My family went from the South to the city to the suburbs because they wanted their children to have the realization of the suburban lifestyle. What does it mean that that doesn’t actually protect you?

If I can help one family embrace their child and not displace them and throw them out, I’m happy about that.

If my making history makes it easier for a trans kid at home somewhere to feel more at home in their skin, then I’m so excited about that.

‘Trumbo’ is conventional in its structure, mixing interviews with archival footage. What I enjoyed most about the film was its liberal use of his own personal letters to friends and family, performed dramatically by well-known actors.

What little return documentary filmmakers get often comes in the form of recognition by their peers and the critics who influence doc audiences around the country.

When I use the word ‘buzz’ in successive sentences, it’s clearly time for me to stop writing.

It would have been tough for anyone to adapt ‘Push’ – an amazing but wrenching novel by Sapphire – for the screen, and I think director Lee Daniels made interesting choices, particularly with Precious’ fantasies. In my view, some of them work and some do not, but they are definitely provocative directorial choices.

There is nothing quite as exciting as watching a master at work.

Film festivals are usually unpleasant experiences on some level. The lines are ridiculous, the crowds are ridiculous, or the schedules are impossibly arranged: ‘You say that there’s a film you really want to see? Try the 8 A.M. show! Oh, it’s too bad you didn’t get to bed until 2 A.M. the night before.’

I love marching bands.

I will never understand how so many young women can go out in the freezing cold wearing so little clothing.

The quality of festival Q&As is often a matter of chance. Sometimes the lights come up on movies I loved, and not a single meaningful question is asked. Sometimes it’s the opposite.

Being nominated is such a tremendous honor. An Oscar win for me and for the ‘Strong Island’ team would be the cap to an incredible journey. But it would also mean that my brother will not disappear from history.

When I was young, I didn’t see anyone who was trans like me anywhere in the movies.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

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.

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

I am two with nature.

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!

I don’t have to ‘freedom-kiss’ my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

Marriage is the death of hope.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ but not in those words.

In California, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into TV shows.

I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

In Beverly Hills… they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a quaker.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

I’m very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.

I’m such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

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

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.

As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree,’ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small.

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

I’d call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.

We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

History is written by the victors.

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express her unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

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

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.

Never, never, never give up.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

Kites rise highest against the wind – not with it.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

The first quality that is needed is audacity.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

‘No comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.

He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.

One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

When I ran, I felt like a butterfly that was free.

After the scarlet fever and the whooping cough, I remember I started to get mad about it all… I went through the stage of asking myself, ‘Wilma, what is this existence all about? Is it about being sick all the time? It can’t be.’ So I started getting angry about things, fighting back in a new way with a vengeance.

I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.

They would say, ‘If you run around too much as a girl, you’ll never be able to have children.’ The running was supposed to be too much strain for your body, and your body would never be the same again.

Down South, there was the old ‘ladies-don’t-do-such-things’ way of thinking. You couldn’t be a lady and a good athlete at the same time.

I was six years old before I realized that there was something wrong with me… But I did have this crooked left leg, and my left foot was turned inward.

No one has a life where everything that happened was good. I think the thing that made life good for me is that I never looked back. I’ve always been positive, no matter what happened.

You become world famous, and you sit with kings and queens, and then your first job is just a job. You can’t go back to living the way you did before because you’ve been taken out of one setting and shown the other. That becomes a struggle and makes you struggle.

In college, I was an education major and qualified for several jobs. But the fame that came with the Olympic medals was too threatening to many people.

There were good jobs, but they were never what I wanted to do. Somehow, people always thought of as a threat.

Later on in life, I discovered that in order for me to be successful, I had to have a challenge. I can’t do a nine to five job.

But when you come from a large, wonderful family, there’s always a way to achieve your goals.

It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s all a matter of discipline. I was determined to discover what life held for me beyond the inner-city streets.

The feeling of accomplishment welled up inside of me, three Olympic gold medals. I knew that was something nobody could ever take away from me, ever.

When the sun is shining I can do anything; no mountain is too high, no trouble too difficult to overcome.

My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

I believe in me more than anything in this world.

I don’t know why I run so fast. I just run.

I ran and ran and ran every day, and I acquired this sense of determination, this sense of spirit that I would never, never give up, no matter what else happened.

I loved the feeling of freedom in running, the fresh air, the feeling that the only person I’m competing with is me.

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you.

The triumph can’t be had without the struggle.

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.

Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The child is father of the man.

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.

What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars.

That best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

The ocean is a mighty harmonist.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.

Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn’t know what he is doing.

To begin, begin.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

Faith is a passionate intuition.

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

I intend to make Georgia howl.

The voice of the people is the voice of humbug.

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.

I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.

He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

War is at its best barbarism.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

You may as well say, ‘That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

There’s many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.

My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.

I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant. I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all the rank I want.

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.

An Army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every change in the rules which impairs the principle weakens the army.

A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit any body but myself. If people don’t like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don’t solicit their opinions or votes.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

It’s a disagreeable thing to be whipped.

If you don’t have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we’ll eat your mules up, sir.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

War is hell.

Courage – a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture.

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. When we are born we cry, that we are come to this great state of fools.

There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered.

But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

Faith, there hath been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.

Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

I see that the fashion wears out more apparel than the man.

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

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Our peace shall stand as firm as rocky mountains.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

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

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

There’s many a man has more hair than wit.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.

Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

What, man, defy the devil. Consider, he’s an enemy to mankind.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

Death is a fearful thing.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.

‘Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

‘Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

Men’s vows are women’s traitors!

Speak low, if you speak love.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

What’s done can’t be undone.

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

I shall the effect of this good lesson keeps as watchman to my heart.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

Boldness be my friend.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes’ palaces.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

O, had I but followed the arts!

In a false quarrel there is no true valor.

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

Exceeds man’s might: that dwells with the gods above.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

Let no such man be trusted.

They do not love that do not show their love.

By that sin fell the angels.

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

‘Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.

How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

In time we hate that which we often fear.

Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

The wheel is come full circle.

The attempt and not the deed confounds us.

They say miracles are past.

I bear a charmed life.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

He that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ the flatterer.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

I was adored once too.

The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.

Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

‘Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

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.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

The love of heaven makes one heavenly.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

And why not death rather than living torment? To die is to be banish’d from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish’d from her Is self from self: a deadly banishment!

I dote on his very absence.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

What is past is prologue.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

O’ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

If music be the food of love, play on.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.

A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

I would rather make my name than inherit it.

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

‘Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

A good laugh is sunshine in the house.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.

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

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Time itself comes in drops.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

Truth is what works.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Belief creates the actual fact.

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

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

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.

Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.

The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.

He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind’s dignity.

Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

Life has a higher end, than to be amused.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

The world is governed by opinion.

Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.

How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace; think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

You know what the Englishman’s idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

To be born woman is to know – although they do not speak of it at school – women must labor to be beautiful.

I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.

This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

In dreams begins responsibility.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought – asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.’

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

One should not lose one’s temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes.

Christ’s crucifix shall be made an excuse for executing criminals.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

Opposition is true friendship.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

The eye altering, alters all.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.

The soul of sweet delight, can never be defiled.

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

One thought fills immensity.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.

Travelers repose and dream among my leaves.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity.

Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.

That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them and the same will it be against Christians.

What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!

Every harlot was a virgin once.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they’d immediately go out.

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.

I have no name: I am but two days old. What shall I call thee? I happy am, Joy is my name. Sweet joy befall thee!

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser’s passion, not the thief s.

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Where mercy, love, and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too.

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

Exuberance is beauty.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel’d to heaven is no artist.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

We can learn much from wise words, little from wisecracks, and less from wise guys.

Wise are they who have learned these truths: Trouble is temporary. Time is tonic. Tribulation is a test tube.

Today is a most unusual day, because we have never lived it before; we will never live it again; it is the only day we have.

The more generous we are, the more joyous we become. The more cooperative we are, the more valuable we become. The more enthusiastic we are, the more productive we become. The more serving we are, the more prosperous we become.

Lose yourself in generous service and every day can be a most unusual day, a triumphant day, an abundantly rewarding day!

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people; to focus your energies on answers – not excuses.

Happiness is an inside job.

Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk.

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.

A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.

A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.

To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity.

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say ‘thank you?’

Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.

Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.

Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.

Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.

Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

I was raised in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic church, lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and had the biggest crush on the Muslim girls from one neighborhood over.

I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion.

I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.

The first time that I performed as an actor was the first day on the set of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’

I had a hit single on the radio for 30 days before I graduated from high school.

And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working.

I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent.

When you create art, the world has to wait.

The first step is you have to say that you can.

The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.

In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.

If you’re not willing to work hard, let someone else do it. I’d rather be with someone who does a horrible job, but gives 110% than with someone who does a good job and gives 60%.

I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.

A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.

I try to speak my points of view about black America, and how I feel about black men and the role that black men should play in their lives with their children and in their lives with their women.

Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.

I don’t know what my calling is, but I want to be here for a bigger reason. I strive to be like the greatest people who have ever lived.

If it was something that I really committed myself to, I don’t think there’s anything that could stop me becoming President of the United States.

In my mind, I’ve always been an A-list Hollywood superstar. Y’all just didn’t know yet.

It’s quite highly possible that I have peaked. I mean, I just can’t imagine what else I could do beyond this. It’s really a bittersweet kind of feeling.

Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is already there.

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There’s so much negative imagery of black fatherhood. I’ve got tons of friends that are doing the right thing by their kids, and doing the right thing as a father – and how come that’s not as newsworthy?

Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.

You can cry, ain’t no shame in it.

My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I’m still a virgin in a lot of ways. I’m not used to being shot down for no reason.

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my ‘’ thing and get paid.

I have a great time with my life, and I wanna share it.

I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.

I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.

Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests – not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed.

My first record came out while I was a senior in high school, which is dangerous.

I mean, I’m very serious with my kids about them comprehending the intricacies of global finance.

I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

So if you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready, and that is how I run my life.

I’ve always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation.

I’ve trained myself to illuminate the things in my personality that are likable and to hide and protect the things that are less likeable.

I want the world to be better because I was here.

Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in ‘The Fugitive.’ That’s how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.

I love producing. I am loving doing that. I think that is my most natural space in the business. I just love producing or editing and that’s where I thrive.

For me, there is nothing more valuable than how people feel in a movie theater about a movie.

As a child, I watched ‘Dallas’ and that was my vision for my life for as long as I could remember.

Whatever your dream is, every extra penny you have needs to be going to that.

Life is lived on the edge.

I would have absolutely messed up ‘The Matrix’.

When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.

Goofy was the word that was used most often by my sisters because I’ve been this tall ever since I was 12 years old.

We all want to be in love and find that person who is going to love us no matter how our feet smell, no matter how angry we get one day, no matter the things we say that we don’t mean.

I’m a student of world religion, so to me, it’s hugely important to have the knowledge and to understand what people are doing.

I was in India recently and my hotel was near the Taj Mahal. Five times a day there would be a call for prayer, and it was the most beautiful thing. I was lying in my bed thinking, no matter what your religion is, it would be great to have that reminder five times a day to remember your Lord and savior.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal they have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

The time to save is now. When a dog gets a bone, he doesn’t go out and make a down payment on a bigger bone. He buries the one he’s got.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

Now if there is one thing that we do worse than any other nation, it is try and manage somebody else’s affairs.

The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Even though you are on the right track – you will get run over if you just sit there.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier ‘n puttin’ it back in.

Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

Buy land. They ain’t making any more of the stuff.

Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.

People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.

The best way out of a difficulty is through it.

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

Don’t gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Politics is applesauce.

A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they now do.

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.

Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

I’m not a real movie star. I’ve still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.

The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.

Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.

The only way you can beat the lawyers is to die with nothing.

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.

A fool and his money are soon elected.

When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‘How is the president?’

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Never let yesterday use up too much of today.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don’t get wet you can keep.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

There ought to be one day – just one – when there is open season on senators.

We don’t seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him ‘father.’

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.

One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.

One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials.

When should a college athlete turn pro? Not until he has earned all he can in college as an amateur.

In Hollywood you can see things at night that are fast enough to be in the Olympics in the day time.

If the other fellow sells cheaper than you, it is called dumping. ‘Course, if you sell cheaper than him, that’s mass production.

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.

If you can build a business up big enough, it’s respectable.

It’s not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Last year we said, ‘Things can’t go on like this’, and they didn’t, they got worse.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

By staying focused on what I intend to create, by believing that the universe is all-providing, and by knowing that I’m worthy of the unlimited beneficence of the Source of being, I just keep attracting prosperity to me.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‘then’ and ‘maybe,’ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

The willingness and ability to live fully in the now eludes many people. While eating your appetizer, don’t be concerned with dessert.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

You aren’t your work, your accomplishments, your possessions, your home, your family… your anything. You’re a creation of your Source, dressed in a physical human body intended to experience and enjoy life on Earth.

The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can’t package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.

Comfort and luxury are usually the chief requirements of life for your ego – its top priorities tend to be accumulations, achievements, and the approval of others.

Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

There is nothing your highest self wants more than peace. This peace makes you feel worthy of all of the richest blessings of the universe, and when you radiate this out into the world, it is returned to you without fail.

In times of need, God can come to you in a myriad of disguises.

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

There is no greater power in Heaven or on Earth than pure, unconditional love. The nature of the God force, the unseen intelligence in all things, which causes the material world and is the center of both the spiritual and physical plane, is best described as pure, unconditional love.

When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace.

Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

The fact is that since you’re a divine creation who originated in the world of Spirit, you have exactly the right amount of smarts to accomplish all that you need and want to do while you’re here on earth. It’s all perfect… and so are you!

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

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.

Practice radical humility. Take no credit for your talents, intellectual abilities, aptitudes, or proficiencies. Be in a state of awe and bewilderment.

Know that any and all thoughts that you have regarding your own skills, interests, and inclinations are valid. To reinforce the validity of your thoughts, keep them private. Tell yourself that they’re between you and God.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

As I followed my dream – stayed in-Spirit, that is, inspired – I made more money in the first year after I gave up my employment than I had made in the previous 35 years of my life.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast – which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others – then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything or anyone, you’re aligning yourself with the beautiful dance of life.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

The essential lesson I’ve learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you’re not here as a human being only. You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

‘Your Erroneous Zones’ was the book that went over the top simply because I believed in it so much.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‘big dharma’ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

As the father of eight children, I’m quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries – it’s the I that’s in the ever-changing body.

Water is the softest of all things, yet it is the most powerful. The ocean patiently allows all things to flow into it. It is always flexible. The Tao is not about grasping, but allowing, like water.

Whenever you’re going through a tough time, generally, you become more compassionate, you become softer, you become more thoughtful, kinder. These are all spiritual qualities that will help you to align yourself with God and God consciousness rather than with a split fear-based consciousness.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

The Tao teaches us to let go of things. Use the 80/20 rule. If you take all your clothes, you’ll find out that you only wear 20 percent of them. Take what you have and don’t use and circulate it. Give stuff to people who truly need it. After all, we come into this world with nothing; we leave this world with nothing.

Give yourself more opportunities for privacy, when you are not bombarded with duties and obligations. Privacy is not a rejection of those you love; it is your deserved respite for recharging your batteries.

Needing to have things perfect is the surest way to immobilize yourself with frustration.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‘hurry sickness.’ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

Keep in mind that no matter how perfectly you get your life in order, you will never be rid of all your problems. Problems are a way of life, always have been, always will be. But how you elect to view those problems is all up to you.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme,’ you will always be in short supply.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don’t understand why it’s the government’s responsibility.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here’s the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

My favorite affirmation when I feel stuck or out of sorts is: Whatever I need is already here, and it is all for my highest good. Jot this down and post it conspicuously throughout your home, on the dashboard of your car, at your office, on your microwave oven, and even in front of your toilets!

I implore you to see the universe as a warm and supportive one because you’ll look for evidence to support this view. When you anticipate that the universe is friendly, you see friendly people. You look for circumstances to work in your favor. You anticipate good fortune flowing into your life.

One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is choosing the kind of universe you exist in: is it helpful and supportive or hostile and unsupportive? Your answer to this question will make all the difference in terms of how you live your life and what kind of Divine assistance you attract.

Dream and you shall become.

Thoughts are mental energy; they’re the currency that you have to attract what you desire. Learn to stop spending that currency on thoughts you don’t want.

One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, to strive to live completely in the present is to strive for what already is the case.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

Heaven is a state of mind, not a location, since Spirit is everywhere and in everything.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

If you want to be a voice for peace in the world, begin by making peace a permanent condition of your own life.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended, and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.

There is not a separate God for each person. There is one universal intelligence flowing through all of us.

Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. You can make the decision to be free from fear and doubt and return to the brilliant light of love that is always with you.

When you face a ‘performance’ that might provoke the ‘I’m scared’ response, choose love and approach your opportunity as a chance to dance with God. It’s more fun than ‘Dancing with the Stars!’

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‘Keep Out’ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

Faith is the complete reliance on the power and goodness of Spirit and the firm belief that you are always connected to this goodness. Always affirm your faith and not your doubt.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‘forever young at heart.’

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.

An artist or a creative person of any kind goes about their work because it’s their path, it’s what excites them, it’s what aligns their soul with who they truly are, who they showed up to be.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Trust and value your own divinity as well as your connection to nature. Seeing God’s work everywhere will be your reward.

Most of us are raised to believe we are ordinary. The anchor of the universe is present in every child. A parent only needs to guide and step aside and let them fulfill their dharma. Help children remember that they can do or be anything.

I always joke that my kids’ favorite holiday is Father’s Day. They love the way I celebrate the occasion by writing each of them a thank-you letter and a generous check. It’s my way of letting them know how much I appreciate the great pleasure and privilege of being their dad.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Meditation is a vital practice to access conscious contact with your highest self.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

If you have passion, there is no need for excuses because your enthusiasm will trump any negative reasoning you might come up with. Enthusiasm makes excuses a nonissue.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

I’ve learned over the years that when I go to that place of passion within me, there’s no force in the universe that can interfere with my completing a project.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

Your Highest Self only wants you to be at peace. It does not judge, compare, or demand that you defeat anyone or be better than anyone.

Within all of us is a divine capacity to manifest and attract all that we need and desire.

Be a force of love as often as you can and turn away negative thoughts whenever you feel them surface.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

Don’t program yourself to break down as you age with thoughts that decline is inevitable. Time may be passing for our bodies, but because they house our ageless souls, we never need to see ourselves as old and infirm.

I don’t believe in ‘thinking’ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness – that there is something wrong.

I am particularly drawn to the form of meditation called Japa. I know it works.

There’s no substitute for the practice of meditation.

Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or ‘inspired,’ if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.

Wanting to feel good is synonymous with wanting to feel God.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

The presence of passion within you is the greatest gift you can receive. Treat it as a miracle.

A person standing in front of an audience without enthusiasm for his subject and his actions is disconnected from his spirit.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Highly functioning self-actualized people simply never imagine what it is that they don’t wish to have as their reality.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‘I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.’

We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do – about what is impossible.

When I chased after money, I never had enough. When I got my life on purpose and focused on giving of myself and everything that arrived into my life, then I was prosperous.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‘I do not understand, and it is fine,’ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.

You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, ‘I release the need for this in my life’.

People who want the most approval get the least and people who need approval the least get the most.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

I think and that is all that I am.

It’s never crowded along the extra mile.

You’ll see it when you believe it.

Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.

There is no way to prosperity, prosperity is the way.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It’s to enjoy each step along the way.

What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Self-worth comes from one thing – thinking that you are worthy.

Only the insecure strive for security.

Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.

Our intention creates our reality.

Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.

You are important enough to ask and you are blessed enough to receive back.

Anything you really want, you can attain, if you really go after it.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

You can’t choose up sides on a round world.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

There’s nothing wrong with anger provided you use it constructively.

We are Divine enough to ask and we are important enough to receive.

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.

You can never get enough of what you don’t want.

Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

Everything is perfect in the universe – even your desire to improve it.

There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.

I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.

You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.

Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‘I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love.’ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.

I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can’t be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they’re not getting some other matter.

I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.

You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.

It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.

We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.

We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we’re only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.

I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of – of American capitalism.

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

Value is what you get.

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful’.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.

There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.

When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.

It is wonderful what strength of purpose and boldness and energy of will are roused by the assurance that we are doing our duty.

A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.

The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-men; and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.

Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.

If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention… It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.

To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.

Look back, and smile on perils past.

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.

Many miles away there’s a shadow on the door of a cottage on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.

O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that’s broken!

Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.

Success – keeping your mind awake and your desire asleep.

For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.

He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below, and saints above: For love is heaven, and heaven is love.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

To all, to each, a fair good-night, and pleasing dreams, and slumbers light.

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?