All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

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

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

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

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

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

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.