It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

But what I knew then was that nobody-- not even my mother-- was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

You must feel what you're singing, not just have a good presentation of the language.

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries [Pakistan and India]. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces.

So much is filtered by pop music today, because the music industry is driven by single, single, single, single, the next single, not the nurturing of artists and that kind of thing.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

I'm not going to apologize for the way I've led my life.

I really feel that artists or musicians are controversial people. Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity. If people are not doing that, they're not artists - they're artisans.