“Loneliness is emptiness, but happiness is you.”

There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.

The things that have always been important: to be a good man, to try to live my life the way God would have me, to turn it over to Him that His will might be worked in my life, to do my work without looking back, to give it all I’ve got, and to take pride in my work as an honest performer.

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source. I have to get fed. I had to get filled up in order to pour out.

It’s good to believe in yourself, but there are people out there who can make or break you.

It takes a real man to live for God-a lot more man than to live for the devil, you know? If you really want to live right these days, you gotta be tough.

My arms are too short to box with God.

Until things are brighter. I’m the man in black.

Love is a burning thing and it makes a firey ring.

There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.

I came to believe in a power much higher than I.

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine I keep my eyes wide open all the time I keep the ends out for the tie that binds Because you’re mine, I walk the line.

You can ask the people around me. I don’t give up. I don’t give up. I don’t give – and it’s not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don’t give up. I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.

The fire and excitement may be gone now that we don’t go out there and sing them anymore, but the ring of fire still burns around you and I, keeping our love hotter than a pepper sprout.

A person knows when it just seems to feel right to them. Listen to your heart.

When I think about country music, I think about America.

If you’re going to be a Christian, you’re going to change. You’re going to lose some old friends, not because you want to, but because you need to.

History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

Stop giving other people the power to control your happiness, your mind, and your life. If you don’t take control of yourself and your own life, someone else is bound to try.

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.

Only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy.

I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness than I had for a long, long time before.