I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

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.

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I’ve found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them.

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

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Seeing is not always believing.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

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.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

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

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Everything isn’t political.

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

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

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

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.