We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

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.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

The American people have not become heartless.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

People have me pinned as a shark or a predator in some way, and in no way am I that. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. I want to defend people. I want to help people.

We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

We just cannot worry about ourselves.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

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.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.