“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!”

One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

When I was done with the movie [Ordinary World], I felt really compelled to start working on another album. Little did I know, they were going to come out back to back.

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

When you’re blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being. When you’re aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.

I threw a big-ass party. It turned out a bit different from Perry’s [in That’s Ordinary World], but it was pretty nuts. It wasn’t me that threw it though, my wife threw me a surprise party. So [unlike Selma Blair’s character] she didn’t forget.

The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

Live a life less ordinary.