Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Players today moan about the number of games, but when you’re young, you can’t play enough.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

We live in ugly times.

You can’t have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

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.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

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!

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

As the father of eight children, I’m quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries – it’s the I that’s in the ever-changing body.

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

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

There are always people always asking you for something. But I feel like I have a foundation. I have a supporting cast where it doesn’t bother me too much.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The little man is still a man.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

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.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

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

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

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.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.