There are often some hundred times, a thousand times, before you can really see it for the first time.
My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.
Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map. . . . A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there. . . and still on your feet.
I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.
I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody. . . Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there.
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Crossing over mountains, rivers, arid oceans, setting at naught, as it were, the obstacles of the distance of space and time, the blood of Indian thought has flowed, and is still flowing into the veins of other nations of the globe, whether in a distinct or in some subtle unknown way. Perhaps to us belongs the major portion of the universal ancient inheritance.