There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

A prayerful life, spiritual act of upholding all that you are capable of being.

When two persons are too close, they fall apart.

It is not in our forming battlements or bristling seacoasts, or our Army and Navy that makes America great - but rather our reliance in the law of liberty and the religious law God has planted in us.

It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.

The permissiveness of society must be balanced with authoritativene ss.

We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.

And I never missed one concert. In 89 shows, I think I did one a bit suspect show. In the old days, I'd pull gigs left, right and center because I was too f - - up.

An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.

Brazil is one of the biggest Latin American countries, the biggest, no doubt, and, more importantly, it is a country with immense development potential.