If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

I am really proud that I am one of the artists that has the opportunity to be on magazine covers and to be in the movies.

Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‚Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path?‘ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

I’m not a bad person.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

I owe my solitude to other people.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Personally, I like reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what kind of things might happen to oneself, and they teach one how to ‚Be Prepared‘ to meet them.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.

It is easy to dismiss the world as ‚irrelevant,‘ or consumed by ‚paranoid anti-Americanism,‘ but perhaps not wise.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

I will be unhappy if I know I have not accomplished something I should have done that was possible.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

At the end of the day, I understand that life has road blocks, and life is like school – you’ll be tested; we gotta pass it.