Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

I am a normal guy from the Black Forest, and I do not compare myself with the geniuses.

For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

The behavior of the crowd at Churchill Downs is like 100,000 vicious Hyenas going berserk all at once in a space about the size of a 777 jet or the White House lawn.

I never had a speech from my father ‚this is what you must do or shouldn’t do‘ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.

No rapper in the world from Jay-Z to Tupac to Biggie has 100 percent love on everything they do.

There is only a finger’s difference between a wise man and a fool.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.

I’ve done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they’re going to be compared directly against other ads.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

There’s no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television’s much better than movies.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.