It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

A celebrated people lose dignity upon a closer view.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

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

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

I only see clearly what I remember.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

When I left Dortmund, I said it’s not important what people think when you come in but what they think when you leave.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there’s always a question of taste.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

I think the American people, with some justification, think that most politicians live in la-la land.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

The less you know, the more you believe.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don’t. I really don’t. Look, if you’re a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. If you’re not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.