Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

I do believe in the old saying, ‚What does not kill you makes you stronger.‘ Our experiences, good and bad, make us who we are. By overcoming difficulties, we gain strength and maturity.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

I dropped out of NYU, moved out of my parent’s house, got my own place, and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That’s a part of it.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Forever is composed of nows.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Evil is whatever distracts.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

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

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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

When I get down, I don’t waller around for long.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

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

Everybody accuses me of moving fast when I direct a picture. I don’t move fast, but I just keep moving.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Desire is the very essence of man.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

We all face storms in life. Some are more difficult than others, but we all go through trials and tribulation. That’s why we have the gift of faith.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‚Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.