“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.

Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Civilization begins with distillation

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

I only used a cell phone for the first time after I was released. I had difficulty coping with it because it seemed so small and insubstantial.

We could almost say that being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms. So acknowledging foolishness is always a very important and powerful experience. The phenomenal world can be perceived and seen properly if we see it from the perspective of being a fool.

The first songs I learned was ‘Crazy’ by Patsy Cline and ‘At Last’ by Etta James. I had been growing up with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, great bands.

The star [Tycho’s supernova] was at first like Venus and Jupiter, giving pleasing effects; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity and death of princes, and destruction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes.

I played my best everyday. You never know when someone may be seeing you play for the first time.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.