I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

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

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

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.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

You can’t take care of charity unless you take care of yourself first.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

Football is a sad game.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Chris Rock does the political thing really well, but that never worked for me.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

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

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

We want our marriage to be a triumph, not a tragedy.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

The squandering of oil and gas is associated with one of the greatest tragedies, not in the least resolved, which is suffered by humankind: climate change.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.