When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

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

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

My son hit his head on a couch and pushed it away. He never went near that couch again. It is amazing what and 1 year old boy can teach you about life.

When you smile it's like the sun coming up.

Where there is water, there are people.

Every knock is a boost.

If you don't manufacture a quality product all you've got at the end is a bunch of expensive mistakes.

True freedom starts with absolute honesty. The moment you call a problem by its real name, you’re already learning how to make it less harmful.

I would not want to be a mobile home repo man. Those would be hard to sneak away - "Knock knock - Hi, would you go cut your grass and look that way for a half an hour?"

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

You have to write or else the auditioning process becomes so grueling because it's so hard to work.