Top 100 Neil Peart Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Half the world hates What half the world does every day Half the world waits While half gets on with it anyway.”

— Neil Peart

52. “Living in the limelight: the universal dream for those who wish to SEEM. Those who wish to BE, must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme.”

— Neil Peart

53. “To get nostalgic about other people’s music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future.”

— Neil Peart

54. “Innocence gave me confidence to go up against reality.”

— Neil Peart

55. “I remain the optimist: you just do your best and hope for the best. But it’s an evolving state of mind.”

— Neil Peart

56. “Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist.”

— Neil Peart

57. “You just become adaptable and try to lead a good life in ways that make sense, regardless. Because I know at the end of it, if I’m going to meet Jesus or Allah or Buddha, I’m going to be all right.”

— Neil Peart

58. “Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school.”

— Neil Peart

59. “Anytime I have an idea, I’ll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don’t have to dream it all out of thin air. I don’t have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.”

— Neil Peart

60. “Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand.”

— Neil Peart

61. “Different hearts beat on different strings.”

— Neil Peart

62. “It’s interesting. I’ve known quite a few good athletes that can’t begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.”

— Neil Peart

63. “It is impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and be a Republican. It’s philosophically absolutely opposed – if they could only think about what they were saying for a minute. That’s when you get caught up in the webs of what people call themselves and how they behave.”

— Neil Peart

64. “I’m a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks.”

— Neil Peart

65. “There’s still a lot I’m angry about, a lot of human behaviour that’s appalling and despicable, but you choose what you can fight against. I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea and it would change things.”

— Neil Peart

66. “The only reason I am alive is because I could not die.”

— Neil Peart

67. “Stamina is the force that drives the drumming; it’s not really a sprint.”

— Neil Peart

68. “You can twist perception, reality won’t budge.”

— Neil Peart

69. “The tarot card ‘The Tower’ seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001.”

— Neil Peart

70. “The ones we wish could hear us have heard it all before.”

— Neil Peart

71. “I love jokes as much as anyone, but I don’t want to hear my snail jokes every day. But I might want to hear a good song every day.”

— Neil Peart

72. “If I do something weird, play it twice and it’s a new part.”

— Neil Peart

73. “People don’t realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiselled down into a song that has to be sung.”

— Neil Peart

74. “I have come to believe that anger and grudges are burning embers in the heart...”

— Neil Peart

75. “I watched a storm pass to the north, trailing veils of dark rain.”

— Neil Peart

76. “All these wounds that I can’t get unwound.”

— Neil Peart

77. “I’m less comfortable in a gregarious social situation, and you can be introverted and still share everything. It just means that you’re guarded.”

— Neil Peart

78. “Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won’t. I wish it were so, and I live that way.”

— Neil Peart

79. “Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, “Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer.””

— Neil Peart

80. “If it’s cross-country ski season, I’ll be out doing that, or snowshoeing up in Quebec. In my California home, I go to the local Y and I like doing yoga. It’s been hugely beneficial to me in injury avoidance.”

— Neil Peart

81. “Lotus-land as it appears in ‘Free Will’ is simply a metaphor for an idealized background, a ‘land of milk and honey.’ It is sometimes also used as a pejorative name for Los Angeles, though that was not in my mind when I wrote it.”

— Neil Peart

82. “Just follow your front wheel.”

— Neil Peart

83. “All four winds together can’t bring the world to me Shadows cast a play of light, so much I want to see Chase the sun around the world, I want to look at life-In the Available Light. I’ll go with the wind, I’ll stand in the light.”

— Neil Peart

84. “Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will – all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.”

— Neil Peart

85. “I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.”

— Neil Peart

86. “Thoreau, “At death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgotten.”

— Neil Peart

87. “Too much attention and hoopla doesn’t agree with my temperament.”

— Neil Peart

88. “I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn’t skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.”

— Neil Peart

89. “Without knowing it, I had identified a subtle but important part of the healing process. There would be no peace for me, no life for me, until I learned to forgive life for what it had done to me, forgive others for still being alive, and eventually, forgive myself for being alive.”

— Neil Peart

90. “I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence – I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I’m told to by self-appointed guides.”

— Neil Peart

91. “To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It’s very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny, and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.”

— Neil Peart

92. “I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face.”

— Neil Peart

93. “What a young musician’s dream, to say, “Look at those chrome drums. Look at that 22-inch ride cymbal. I’ll have those.” It was one of those unparalleled exciting days of your life.”

— Neil Peart

94. “I’m still no good at ball-and-stick games. If I go play golf with the guys, it’s intended to be a joke.”

— Neil Peart

95. “Spiritual yearnings are natural to many people, and may give them solace or hope, but extremists of any stripe are not content with faith as armor; they must forge it into a sword.”

— Neil Peart

96. “Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.”

— Neil Peart

97. “It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later.”

— Neil Peart

98. “When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, “If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!””

— Neil Peart

99. “As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little “terraced” houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road – it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined.”

— Neil Peart

100. “I want to be an improviser, and I’ve worked very hard at that. It’s an art. You don’t just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do.”

— Neil Peart