If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

My home is in Heaven. I’m just traveling through this world.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

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.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‚sophisticated‘ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don’t understand.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.