RZA famous quotes

Inspiration is found everywhere if you look hard enough.
-- RZA

#Inspiration #Looks #Enough

There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.
-- RZA

#Wise #Strong #Men

I advise everyone to find an island in this life. Find a place where this culture can't take energy away from you, sap your will and originality. Since anything physical can be mental, that island can be your home. Turn off the electromagnetic waves being forced upon you, the countless invisible forces coming at you all the time.
-- RZA

#Home #Islands #Culture

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?
-- RZA

#Self #Important #Knowing God

If you live through defeat, you are not defeated. If you are beaten but acquire wisdom, you have won. Lose yourself to improve yourself. Only when we shed all self-definition do we find who we really are.
-- RZA

#Self #Definitions #Defeat

Every cell has certain knowledge. I think knowledge is contained within the genetics, even. I think scientists will find that. I don't think there's a gay gene, though. They may argue that down, but I don't think that, because that's a preference.
-- RZA

#Gay #Thinking #Cells

I think most of my approach to life has been like that, to find order in chaos, to be in the middle of a bunch of things happening at the same time, but find focus. I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it - millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way.
-- RZA

#Men #Thinking #Order

I think one thing most of faiths have in common is they all realize that everything manifests from one [god]. That's whether you're dealing with science, religion, Bible, whatever. They all realize it all came from one, and then from one, you got many.
-- RZA

#Thinking #Common #Realizing

Took two drags off the blunts, and started breaking down the flag: The blue is for the Crips, the red is for the Bloods, The whites for the cops, and the stars come from the clubs Or the slugs that ignite, through the night, By the dawn early light, why is sons fighting for the stripe?
-- RZA

#Stars #Rap #Son

The word "knowledge" itself, we like to break it down into two different words, "know" and "ledge." You've got to know the ledge. Know the limitation of things. Know where they go, know where they start from. We say knowledge is the basic foundation of the universe. But everything is first based on something being known. Then, when it's known, then it can be manifested.
-- RZA

#Two #Different #Ledges

Don't wait till you die to go to heaven.
-- RZA

#Waiting #Heaven

One thing that definitely did calculate properly for me was the mathematics that makes sense every day, no matter how I look at it, I can't get around it. I try to get around it, I keep trying to find one plus one is not two, somehow. I can't. People can talk about string theory, parallel realities, different dimensions, it's still one plus one is two, baby.
-- RZA

#Baby #Reality #Two

How can hip hop be dead if Wu-Tang is forever?
-- RZA

#Forever #Hip Hop #Hips

Experience is the best teacher. But in our day and time, what we need is wisdom, because wisdom overcomes experience, because experience is wisdom, but there's a level of wisdom that overcomes the experience, and that's the experience that's already lived by others. I'm not trying to repeat the histories. I already learned from what they did.
-- RZA

#Teacher #Trying #Needs

Life comes when you have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, when you can see for real, touch, and feel for real, know for real. Then you are truly living.
-- RZA

#Real #Understanding #Truly Living

You can be born gay, but not because of your genetics, I think because of your subconscious more than your genetics. I think genetically, we're made to reproduce. We can't survive this route. Genetically, that's the way to go. Genetically, we have to reproduce, but subconsciously, and preferentially, you can be born with that.
-- RZA

#Gay #Thinking #Way

Confusion is a gift from God. Those times when you feel most desperate for a solution, sit. Wait. The information will become clear. The confusion is there to guide you. Seek detachment and become the producer of your life.
-- RZA

#Confusion #Waiting #Information

Love is mistranslated into sex, because sex is not an expression of love. Sex is an expression of physical activity. It can be an expression of love between two people in love, but it's a carnal expression.
-- RZA

#Sex #Love Is #Expression

Happiness is total and complete satisfaction with yourself
-- RZA

#Satisfaction

Just bring love. Everybody keeps bringing violence, let's bring love.
-- RZA

#Violence

Keep my planets in orbit, Never forfeit or quit, Move forward... I talk with the awkward slang, I walk with the Wu-Tang.
-- RZA

#Rap #Moving #Hip Hop

One of the greatest things that ever taught me a super lesson was when I seen a baby come out of my woman's womb. Seeing this war that could end with both lives being lost, or both lives being made, gave me an enlightenment of life itself. It sparked my whole mind to a whole other level of living. And if I never would have seen it, I never would have understood life. I never would have appreciated life.
-- RZA

#Baby #War #Mind

I invested in the album. Look, if I never did anything again in music, it wouldn’t affect my life materially. I live a very satisfying life. Not because I’ve made a few dollars, but because I have a wife who loves me and children who wait for me to come home. And that is beautiful. I think that’s the American dream: to be at peace at home.
-- RZA

#Beautiful #Dream #Children

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.
-- RZA

#Knowing #Self #Know Yourself

How can you defame mud when such a beautiful flower grows from it?
-- RZA

#Beautiful #Flower #Mud

Whether I went to school or not, I would always study.
-- RZA

#School #Study

Find your true self. The old question, asked in many ages, "Who am I?" Once you figure out who am I, and you know who am I, then you have that knowledge of self.
-- RZA

#Self #Age #Figures

The first person you have to resurrect is yourself
-- RZA

#Firsts #Persons

The truth shall set you free. When you hear the truth, it sets you free. So mathematics is truth. It adds up. There's no error. Only time there's an error is when man miscalculates his own problems or his own equations.
-- RZA

#Men #Errors #Add

Kung fu was made so the monks could train their bodies and move their bodies with strength, so they could be physical enough to gain mental enlightenment. Before that, they kept falling asleep when [masters] were trying to teach them.
-- RZA

#Moving #Fall #Enlightenment

The fundamental message of the Wu Tang music is as vast as the ocean in all reality, but it's still a straight path. You can take one lyric and by researching what that lyric is giving out to you, it should give you more than a day's worth of school, maybe three days' worth of school.
-- RZA

#Ocean #School #Reality

Once you've got an inspired spark, you've got to strive. You've gotta keep putting wood on it, so they say, to keep it burning. But then there's the alchemist side of it, that's the fire that's burning but it don't burn.
-- RZA

#Fire #Alchemist #Burning

When you feel this knowledge and this spark in yourself, you've gotta continue feeding it. The best thing is to spend time around other wise men, that keeps it burning. That keeps it in every degree sharp as steel, but make sure you absorb enough to find out how it sparks from yourself, how the self starts the self. Once you've got that you should be free. That's freedom, to me.
-- RZA

#Wise #Men #Self

In today's society, the forces against you are heavy against you. The whole goal is to get knowledge of yourself, but people are so far from themselves that they don't believe themselves.
-- RZA

#Believe #Goal #People

Knowledge is like fire 'cause it breaks down things so you can see what they truly are. It's like how a fire breaks your body down to carbon.
-- RZA

#Fire #Body #Causes

The body is a vehicle for the mind, and that vehicle is how you travel through space.
-- RZA

#Space #Mind #Body

An architect is a person who builds homes or structures, stadiums even. A Supreme Architect is someone who actually built the universe. So, if I say I am the Supreme Architecture, I'm letting Allah speak. I'm becoming a vehicle.
-- RZA

#Home #Becoming #Architecture

There's the 5% of the people that are wise and righteous and I'd definitely be amongst them, building, communicating, and continuing to try and figure out how we can awaken the 85%. The 85% are walking around [like] cattle, not realizing the things we do, the violence we do; you see people falling victim to all sorts of unnecessary things because they just don't know the way and nobody is showing them the way.
-- RZA

#Wise #Fall #People

The most revealing books are the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible. The Bhagavad Gita is a great book as well, and the works of Buddha. These are the major influences on the world.
-- RZA

#Book #World #Gita

Knowledge is first and wisdom is the manifestation of knowledge. To understand this tone and pattern of thinking in the numerical way automatically resonated with me.
-- RZA

#Thinking #Way #Firsts

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.
-- RZA

#Art #Years #Ideas

Happiness is something you get from yourself. If you're completely satisfied with yourself, nobody can take it away from you.
-- RZA

#Away From You #Satisfied

It's harder to make the glass than break the glass.
-- RZA

#Glasses #Break #Harder

Aiyyo, camoflouge chameleon, ninjas scalin' your building, No time to grab the gun, I already got your wife and children
-- RZA

#Children #Rap #Gun

Just as you must come through a woman's womb to attain physical birth, so must you come through Wisdom to achieve mental birth. And like childbirth, Wisdom often comes with pain.
-- RZA

#Pain #Birth #Achieve

This is a robbery, boy, gimme them dollars. We hit the lottery, boy, it's in ya wallets!
-- RZA

#Rap #Boys #Hip Hop

You are a 64-track recording - the tracks are always there, they're always with you. Sometimes the harsh tracks are cranked up and the rest are rolled down to zero. Other times the sweet tracks are high and the darkness is low. But it's all you.
-- RZA

#Sweet #Zero #Track

Grew up in Stapleton House village, where blood flood the waters in the streets like oil spillage
-- RZA

#Rap #Blood #Oil

We put out real hip-hop at a time when it was turning into pop or R&B ... We brought the focus back to the music in its rawest form, without studio polish or radio hooks. ... People want something that gives them an adrenaline rush. We're here to supply that fix.
-- RZA

#Real #Giving #People

Complainin' to my lawyer how this rookie tried to frisk me... Jealous of my jeep, I gave his badge to the chief, And got his ***** directin' traffic in the heat for a week.
-- RZA

#Rap #Jealous #Hip Hop

Cats be talkin', "Bobby I ain't feelin' ya." But I bet if I was peelin' your cap back with a two-shot Dillinger Hot lead released from my cylinder, You'd be talkin' 'bout, "Bobby I'm feelin' ya!"
-- RZA

#Rap #Cat #Two

Feeling mad hostile, wearing Aéropostale, Flowing like Christ when I speaks the gospel.
-- RZA

#Rap #Mad #Hip Hop

A day to God is a thousand years, Men walk around with a thousand fears. The true joy of love brings a thousand tears, In the world of desire, there's a thousand snares.
-- RZA

#Rap #Men #Years

You can see the weakness of a man right through his iris.
-- RZA

#Rap #Men #Hip Hop

Fear is a state of nervousness only fit for children
-- RZA

#Children #Fit #States