Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

Music transcends language. BTS communicates with our fans by staying true to ourselves and believing in music every day.

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Many of us are experiencing a phase of change, shedding outdated patterns and liberating ourselves from the old by moving on to the new. The year 2012 is an important one for mankind, a pivotal year. The potential for this exists in the mere fact that the majority of us are yearning for change.

If it were the Clinton people, they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security, which the needle is not moving on.

The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.

Many movies about people recovering, moving on, and redeeming themselves are really wonderful and inspiring. But I think the more sentimental ones that are less good make me feel isolated - like, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the guys in the movies, there is something wrong with you. That's a shame.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can't let our circumstances or what others do or don't do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

If you're not a real chameleon of an actor and if you're not one of those guys who can really shape-change themselves all the time, one of the ways to keep pushing yourself and keep changing is to be in different kinds of movies.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

We used to go to movies to see stories about ourselves. It would transport us to new worlds and we'd see aspects of ourselves reflected back.

Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year.

Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.

One great thing about going to a fashion event in the morning, especially in February in New York, is that the other attendees are dressed less like models themselves. A winter coat, it turns out, is a great equalizer.

Whether it's this year or next year, I don't want to leave basketball limping out of basketball. At the end of the day, we're all men and we all look at ourselves every morning and you have to ask yourself, Did I leave the way I wanted? Did I do everything I possibly could do to leave the way I want?'

When a lot of people wake up in the morning and put on their underwear, the first thing they feel that day is terrible about themselves. When you see that your body is not what other people want, it can be really devastating. I have so many friends that I grew up with who have had serious eating disorders.

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.

Burning desire to be or do something gives us staying power - a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment.

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.

Money won't make you happy... but everybody wants to find out for themselves.