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.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

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

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

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

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

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

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

It’s always going to be a fight for anyone who isn’t an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn’t have a fight.

I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

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

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

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

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

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

I feel that there are a few things in the world without cultural barriers.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on. And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

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

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

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

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.