“The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.”

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

You fall in love with people’s minds.

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

Your eyes make me shy.

Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

I remember when I was 11, I did some Kung-fu demonstrations in Hong Kong in 1974.

There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

I think we need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of imagination, the respect for wisdom that so marked Islam in its great ages.

I actually get a lot of messages with people saying, ‘What’s a Marvin Gaye?’ and, I mean… Oh, wow. I must be getting old, because someone who was born in 2004 just asked me what a Marvin Gaye was.