I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

Sin is geographical.

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

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

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

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

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’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

I’m 5’11, so when I wear heels, it’s definitely a really good view that I have. I’m, like, 6’2 when I wear heels, so I tend to wear cowboy boots a lot.

I’ve actually taken companies public, I’ve actually busted companies, I’ve actually gone broke.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

I’ve been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Life is our dictionary.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

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.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

When you’re older you want to learn from other people.