If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely – the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears – when you give your whole attention to it.

I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

You can’t think; you just gotta do things.

To make headway, improve your head.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

You have to feel confident. If you don’t, then you’re going to be hesitant and defensive, and there’ll be a lot of things working against you.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

Oh, the difference between nearly right and exactly right.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

The less you know, the more you believe.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

There are many things that happen every day that we could murmur about if we let ourselves go there. But they really aren’t worth the effort it takes to get upset and gripe about it.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

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.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.