He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

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.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

If you want to be a good strategist, you can never just go off a principle you read in a book. You need to adapt what you do to the situation; no rule of thumb is true all the time.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

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.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

History is more or less bunk.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Youth is wasted on the young.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

It’s a funny old world.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.