One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

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.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

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

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

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.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Let the path be open to talent.

Youth is wasted on the young.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

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

I always have an optimistic view, no matter what it is.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.