Changes are not unusual – I mean, most movies, when they release them, they make changes. But somehow, when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

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

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

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

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

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

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

I just make good movies. That’s the way I thank my fans.

I’ve always loved the showmanship of professional wrestling. While I love making movies, I love that platform, too.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

In every movie I do have a dialogue.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

One of the skills I had to learn and become proficient in is kissing a man. I had never kissed a man. Will Smith did it in his movies, so did Jake Gyllenhaal, and I figured it was my time. So it was me and Steve Carell – fantastic.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.