I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

I loved what I did. I could’ve been secretary of state for ever.

For somebody who loves foreign policy, being Secretary is the best job in the world – but it doesn’t happen twice.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

I had a lot of success from the start. I never really was tested for long periods of time. I got my first professional job while I was a senior in college. I signed with the William Morris Agency before I graduated.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

When I was young I felt really overwhelmed and confused by the desire not to end up in an office, doing something I didn’t believe in.

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

Actor’s life is very long.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

Research is creating new knowledge.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

I dropped out of high school and I couldn’t go to college ‚cause I wasn’t smart enough, so I’d resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.

I believe you’ve got to do your due diligence.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

I guess you could say it’s always been my destiny to be a performer.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

I left school to concentrate on racing. It was a family decision between my mum, dad and myself.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

In any profession it gets to be a grind.

Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I had jobs that I loved. I worked in city government. I ran a youth organization. I served as an associate dean at a university. And I couldn’t imagine how a baby would fit into all of that.

I like to work.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.

I’m not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.

I have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they’re actresses or singers or things like that.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

I’ve enjoyed all the parts of my career.

My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

Nothing extraordinary happens to a cricketer if you time his career – which is very short.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

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.‘

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

Before I was born, my father told my mother, ‚If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.‘

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

Work is making a living out of being bored.

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

Any man who has had the job I’ve had and didn’t have a sense of humor wouldn’t still be here.