B. B. King

Ignorance is bliss? That’s bull, far as I’m concerned. Because I was making a half a cent a side – one penny for a record. It’s like building buses, for example. If you built this bus for me and I didn’t know anything about it, you could charge me whatever I’d pay for it. Now, which one of us is crazy? Me. And that’s the way they did me on the records. But I don’t fault them for it, because if you don’t know, you don’t know. It took me to learn.

I don’t like anybody to be angry with me. I’d rather have friends.

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.