A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.
For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.
Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.
To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.
[On handling stress] When you start projecting on the future "Oh my God, I gotta do this and I'm not there yet" well, of course you're not there yet because you're here now. That time will come. . . I try to stay in the moment as much as I can and find whatever joy I can in that moment, no matter what it is. Then it doesn't feel as stressful.
The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty. . .
In the past, people could use their music because there are these bootlegs floating around that were supposedly public domain but they weren't, and now they've locked everything up and it's become really near impossible to use their music in movies.
Going to Morocco was massive; that's where I really found music which had the African syncopation and swing mixed with Arabic strains, and together they had this transporting, bittersweet quality.