A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.

FaceTime helps me a lot. I feel like I’m at home even though I’m not.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.

Debates, I hate.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Disagreement is something normal.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they’re much more open.

There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Better understated than overstated. Let people be surprised that it was more than you promised and easier than you said.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

Silence is safer than speech.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

I’ve always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.

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

It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

When I’m nervous, I stutter, and I had to keep stopping and starting.

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

If your man is a sports enthusiast, you may have to resign yourself to his spouting off in a monotone on a prize fight, football game or pennant race.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.