An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.

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

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

The less you know, the more you believe.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

It’s one thing to be religious, but it’s another thing to make religion your policy.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

Inside of every problem lies an opportunity.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

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

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don’t mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I don’t want to hear the word ‚can’t.‘

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.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

We should understand the source of our authority and something of the keys that control its power.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

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.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

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.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.