When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Little things affect little minds.

Life is our dictionary.

Everything isn’t political.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

I have an immense amount of respect for acting. I’ve always loved movies and was always fascinated by movie-making. But to become an actor, I wanted to commit myself.

I don’t really get into a big intellectual analysis of why I am going to do a certain script or not.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Sin is geographical.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

I’d go from film to film and almost detach from one world and jump in another. I was living as these people and not having a self. I didn’t know who I was. And things just get really dark.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

I’m not a bad person.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

Be as you wish to seem.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

There is so much that people take for granted.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

I think the word rich is all relative.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Fear, separation, hate and anger come from the wrong view that you and the Earth are two separate entities, the Earth is only the environment. You are in the centre and you want to do something for the Earth in order for you to survive. That is a dualistic way of seeing.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.