Willie Nelson quotes: your favorite guitar strummin’, weed smokin’, country singin’ hippie gives you a tour inside his mind.
“There is only one map to the journey of life and it lives within your heart.”
“If you wait for tomorrow to follow your dreams, by the time that you get there… they’re gone.”
“Be careful what you dream: soon your dreams will be dreaming you.”
“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.”
“I have this kind of philosophy that I can’t do anything about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I feel in full control of what’s going on now. I think worry will make you sick. I’ve never seen it accomplish anything. I’ve never seen worrying about anything change it. So I decided not to do it. If you can’t do anything about it, why in the hell worry about it? Every negative thought you have releases poison into your system, and will kill you or give you cancer or tumors or whatever else you can think of. So if you are thinking negative about anything, erase that.”
“When you put your life in a good place, good things follow.”
“If you can be content right now, then you’ll always be content, because it’s always right now.”
“Freedom is control in your own life.”
“Be gentle with your words – you can’t take them back.”
“Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there.”
“You’ll never get ahead by blaming your problems on other people.”
“Hope remains when pride is gone, and it keeps you moving on.”
“Let the jerks of the world serve as the perfect example of what you don’t want to be. You’ll be a heck of a lot happier, and in the long run, there’s a chance that other person at work will end up asking what your secret is. Why are you the happy one? In other words, don’t let your thoughts think you. Besides, if you’re really gonna get pissed, don’t waste it on your family, friends, or coworkers, save it for something that really matters.”
“A lot of people make money off of fear and negativity and any way they can feed it to you is to their benefit in a lot of ways. You can’t avoid it completely; you have to be open enough that sh*t doesn’t stick on you, it goes through, because you are gonna be hit and bombarded all the time with negativity. You just let things go on through without trying to stop them or block them.”
“Like anything else, you can use the internet for good or ill. You can get out of it what you want to. There’s no evil about it. The way I see it, it’s a liberation.”
“It’s an ongoing problem, an ongoing situation, life is. It’s just life, and it never stops and it never will. You just be thankful for what you’ve got, and move on.”
“God has blessed you richly, so get down on your knees and thank him. Don’t forget the less fortunate… or God will personally kick your ass. I’d love to do it for him, but I can’t be everywhere.”
“Memories remind us that every moment of our lives, even the most tragic, have contributed to our strength. We’ve gotten through. We’re still here.”
“Anybody can be unhappy. We can all be hurt. You don’t have to be poor to need something or somebody. Rednecks, hippies, misfits – we’re all the same. Gay or straight? So what? It doesn’t matter to me. We have to be concerned about other people, regardless.”
“If you’ve made your own hell, then only you have the power to escape it.”
“You will never find happiness until you stop looking for it.”
“We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.”
“As far as advice goes, an ex-father in law of mine once gave me the best advice I ever heard. He said, ‘Take my advice and do what you want to.’ So with that, go on.”
“I learned some invaluable lessons in Nashville that apply to both farming and showbusiness: do not corner something you know is meaner than you; keep skunks of all kinds at a distance; if you forgive your enemies, it messes up their heads.”
“We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.”
“I started learning my lessons in Abbot, Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents. We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn’t want to spend my life picking cotton.”
“It didn’t take long for me to realize that writing, performing, and singing songs was what I was meant to do, but what other people thought was an entirely different issue. If I had to break it down, I’d say about 99% of the people in my life were telling me I wasn’t going to make it. All that adversity and lack of faith ended up just strengthening my own convictions. All that negativity really helped me in the end, because there’s no better inspiration for doing something than having somebody say that you can’t do it.”
“Songwriting – it’s a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience.”
“Well, songs come easy to me. I’ve written hundreds of them. I see them as little stories that fall out of our lives and imaginations. If I have to struggle to write a song, I stop before I start. I figure if it don’t flow easy, it’s not meant to be. The truth should flow easy. Same for songs and stories. If you overanalyze or torture yourself to bring them to life, something’s wrong. Just the way a mountain stream, bubbling with fresh clean water, keeps flowing, stories need to flow free and easy. The source of the water, like the source of the songs, comes from up high. It’s a natural thing. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“I like myself better when I’m writing regularly.”
“I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.”
“Writing books is fun because after I do a show for a couple hours, I’m in a bus for 22 hours.”
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”
“The life I love is making music with my friends.”
“I live one day at a time, one day at a time. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow is blind, so I live one day at a time.”
“I take it not only a day at a time, but a moment at a time, and keep it at that pace. If you can be happy right now, then you’ll always be happy, because it’s always in the now.”
“I just enjoy both working and not working.”
“Death is not the ending of anything. I believe all of us are only energy that becomes matter. When the matter goes away, the energy still exists. You can’t destroy it. It never dies. It manifests itself somewhere else.”
“We are never alone. Even by ourselves, we are not alone. Death is just a door opening to somewhere else. Someday we’ll know what that door opens to.”
“All I do is play music and golf – which one do you want me to give up?”
“On the road again, goin’ places that I’ve never been. Seein’ things that I may never see again, and I can’t wait to get on the road again.”
“I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs. When I was on drugs I couldn’t even find my bike.”
