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

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

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

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

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

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘

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

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

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

It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

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

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

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

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

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.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it’s been tested by recession and all manner of challenges – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis‘ future.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

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

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.