A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

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

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

The best road to progress is freedom’s road.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

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.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

I don’t think I would be interested in the climate at all if I had been like everyone else.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

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

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

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

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

I just grew the hair on my back. Facial hair just wasn’t appealing to me. I liked it on my back, though.

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

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Youth is wasted on the young.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

Life is a song to me.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

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

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

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

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.