You know, any sane magician would never reveal his method of deception. And I don't think that a sensible musician would either.
Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.
Your job is not to be perfect, your job is only to be human.
I've learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, and preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of a deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all and the foundation for our collective survival.
Sometimes the most important things that we do are things we cannot measure.
The only way we really create change is to enter any situation with the humility to listen and to recognize the world as it is, and then the audacity to dream what it could be, to have the patience to start and let the work teach you, to be willing to lead when you need to lead, and to listen. To have a sense of generosity and empathy, but not over-empathy, because accountability is so critical to building solutions that work.
Every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road sometimes based on a dream of a past that never was, fear of each other, distancing and blame, or we can take the much more difficult path, the road of transformation, transcendence, compassion, and love, but also accountability and justice.
Beginning authors often get in their own way … They forget that they’ve been telling stories since they could talk. … The important thing to remember is, you know how to do this. You’ve been doing this your whole life.
I really believe that we have the power to manifest our own fates.
People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized. " Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.
Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.