Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

Reality is a sliding door.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity.

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

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.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

No matter how bad any situation, cynicism has no positive impact. Watching the news, you might notice that cynicism and victimhood often seem to go hand-in-hand, but not for veterans.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

You’re beautiful, like a May fly.

Once people are aware of your presence, and perhaps vaguely intrigued, you need to stir their interest before it settles on someone else.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

There is no gambling like politics.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.