Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

You don’t need to buy expensive cosmetics; almost anything will do if you know how to apply it.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

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

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‚Run like hell and all of fire.‘ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

I’m one of the luckiest people on earth.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North – that’s our highway – there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I’d be like, that’s what my house is going to look like when I get older. I’m going to start making my house look like this.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I don’t want flowers or candy or anything like that. I just want somebody to say, ‚Wow, you’ve done a great job.‘

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

You make yourself broad. You make yourself appealing. ‚Hey, y’all, I’m cool with everybody.‘ That’s my message.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

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.

I’m so happy because today I found my friends – they’re in my head.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Money ain’t everything.

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

In every parting there is an image of death.

When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.