People say my ego is grand. I think it's in proportion to me.
His most frequent ailment was the headache which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee.
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
Our aspirations are our possibilities.
Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down. . . Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.
This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.
After all the allowances are made for the necessity of having a few supermen in our midst - explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history - the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished.