John Quotes
Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, "Whatever it is, I am bigger than it," is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things.
You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.
I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.
The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.
I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.
There’s no mystery to integrity. There’s no mystery to oneness. When there is a core-splitting honesty, right there, awareness knows.
I knew that I wanted to create rich themes, and something that people might really relate to emotionally. That was the quest, authenticity, and then just to make the audience feel something.
Saturday night in Toledo Ohio, Is like being nowhere at all, All through the day how the hours rush by, You sit in the park and you watch the grass die.
I was never trying to write a hit. I was just trying to write good songs and get a message out, and it was my great good fortune to be popular.
Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.
We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things.
The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.
Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.
Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.
It's fun, I didn't have enough money as a kid to buy a drum set, so I had to do something. I would mimic the sounds. That was it. And it worked. It worked for years.
I think that it's really, really funny to see adult themes in a genre that's usually directed towards children.
I just don't like it when people get credited for their voice work and it's really shitty. It's really thin, there's nothing to it, there's no meat behind it. It's, like, "Oh, it's a celebrity."
The Democratic Party needs to look carefully at moving towards the middle, where the American people are.
I don't look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can't photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.
In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.
I think The Eagles single-handedly destroyed country music - well, now, country music has been killed by rap crossovers, so it's hard to say. Maybe we can just agree that money killed country music.
Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon.
There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.
The sun must not set upon anger, much less will I let the sun set upon the anger of God towards me.
...Whatever dies was not mixed equally, If our two loves be one Or thou and I love so alike That none can slacken, none can die.
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.
Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.
