There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself.

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life—becoming a better person.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man.

Find comfort in little things and joy in unexpected moments.

If the only option you leave poor people with is to resort to violence in order to survive, they’ll do just that. And there are lots more poor people in this world than there are rich ones.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

It is often spur-of-the-moment decisions, sometimes made by others, that can change our whole lives.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.

The defenders of the status quo often masquerade as the preservers of harmony.

I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants, but also publish it.

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.