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

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

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

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

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

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

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

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.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

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 my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

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.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

My life is real.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

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

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

I actually don’t want a throne at all, because I don’t view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

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

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

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

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.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.