Dave Matthews Quotes

I think about quitting all the time. I'll take such a little thing and be like, "I quit! I've had enough of you people!" And then...I don't know, it gets better. I'm not really good at making plans so I don't have any definite plans for the future. I would love to have a family and kids at some point.

We tend to think of extremes of emotions as registering, for example, you have to cry or laugh or get angry. But for the most part, we find it difficult to read each other most of the time. If you walk through the street, most people are pretty difficult to read. But they're thinking inside.

I'm a crier. You won't see me lashing out, but you will see me crying a lot.

I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and 'Little Women' was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it's such a sad book in so many ways. I'd cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings.

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning or changes for the worse.

I was a very sensitive kid who then had to condition myself to desensitize.

As a young child, I was never a crier. I never cried to get my way, or even when I was in pain.

I was highly sensitive and still am, but as a kid I could tap into my emotional state rather easily.

You know, the emotion - it comes in my art. The kind of person I am, I can deal with things, and I do and I can, but I'm not a crier.

Even as a boy, my dad always told me, 'Don't show emotion.' If I banged my cue, he would give me a row and say, 'Stop that.' Don't show any petulance. It was developed, certainly, but I think you have got to have it in you.

I learned to practice smiling when I'm feeling sad, you know?

Music itself isn't enough to completely wear down my stash of anger. And I don't have all that much more to be angry about than anyone else. It's not like I was abused as a kid or anything. I had a pretty comfortable childhood with parents who took good care of me. But resentment exists, and some of it goes into the music. Some of it goes into physical activity.

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

When I've had a meltdown, people will say to me, "Well, you failed to keep your sense of humor."

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.

I don't cry in real life. I'm just pretty light and I don't get too heavy.

I do think once I get into expectations, I've just trained myself. I've just trained myself to just move on to the next.

I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

My mother used to tell me: "You gotta smile more. Because if you don't smile, the way you look at people, they'll think you're mad at them."

I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can't. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on - that's something I can do.

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity....when such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere with smooth social interaction. By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a choice as to how we express our feelings.

Crying is not a weakness. It's something that should be able to work for you. It should also be a strength. I think if you can cry when you feel like crying it's a strength. If you feel like crying and you can't cry, that's a weakness. That means you're holding all that stuff inside.

The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.