Jonathan Ames Quotes

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.

Everything we do is either an act of love or a cry for help.

You can only have as much love for yourself as you can express to others.

All humans need love, attention, and appreciation, and those can be very female traits. I feel like they should be male and female traits, but I think that they are more easily attributed to women.

There are some of us who think to ourselves, 'If I had only been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby. I would have washed His linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!' Why don't we do it now? We have Christ in our neighbor.

I think we're past the time in history where you have to come out and say, "I'm happy all the time! I'm a joker! I'm a crazy man!" I think people understand that I can turn that switch on but that I'm also a sensitive, normal human being with feelings and I know how to express those too.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. And a tail is an awkward thing to laugh with, as you can see by the way they bend themselves half double in extreme hilarity trying to get that rear-end exuberance forward into the main scene of action. What puts man on a higher stage of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

I am driven by what you are able to accomplish and how you are able to help some people. I go about it each and every day, sometimes I think I say yes too much and I am too busy in my life.

It's such a simple thing, really. It's an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what's right instead of what you think you're supposed to do, you should do it.

What is the definition of cool? Michael Jackson made “Heal the World.” He could do that because he was golden. He was himself. He didn't have to try to be cool. Think about a lot of your favorite bands or groups. Would they make a song called “Heal the World”? No, because they are too concerned about their leather jackets. Ironically, they are probably wearing leather jackets because of Michael Jackson.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

I don't think you tell someone you love them because you expect something. I think you tell them because you have something to give.

I think being a singer-songwriter... your job is to tell a story that other people can't really tell themselves.

If we stop thinking of ourselves and only of helping others, you will start to see a dramatic improvement in the suffering we are all going through.

I think I've always been aware of it with my music. I think growing up basically and having a lot to deal with and just slowing down and having something to say and something to retract from, I think I just knew that what I was doing was extremely honest.

Oh, Mona, we're all damned fools! Some of us just have more fun with it than others. Loosen up, dear! Don't be so afraid to cry . . . or laugh, for that matter. Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you're a damned fool!

She writes that one of the moments that she felt most useful was when her mother had a headache, and she would stroke her head and rub her forehead. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt's entire life was dedicated to two things: (one) making it better for all people, people in trouble and in need, like her family.

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.

To a gratefull man give mony when he askes.

One of the things I like to do is people's hearts are on their sleeve, whether it's a good or a bad heart. And I think that's one of the things living in a world with Powers would do: it's too theatrical not to express yourself constantly. It would change them socially and sexually, everything would be altered because of superheroes.

Take time to make a difference. Don't just obsess about how you can make your life better. Think about how you can make somebody else's life better as well.

Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.

I think what I really want to do [is] do something charitable.

Most people think of success in terms of getting; success, however, begins in terms of giving.

I have found that the more I get my ego out of a picture and the more I think about how can I serve other people instead of always thinking about me, the more miracles show up.