“The great artist is a slave to his ideals.”

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man’s life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship into port may blow another off shore.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.

When we get tired of enjoying all the pleasures within our reach, we have still a resource in thinking of others that are not.

As an artist myself I don’t like to be preached. I want to enjoy myself, so I kind of use that perspective to make music.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

I can’t say any artist inspired me, because I’m inspired by the things that go on around me.

I love, love, love just being hands on at all times in the studio.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.

My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.

I do have a lot of music out.

I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on artists to be 100-percent organic all the time.