In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

I’m perpetually lonely.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Our inquiring friends and neighbors not of our faith can also catch the wave. We encourage them to keep all that is good and true in their lives. And we invite them to receive more, especially the glorious truth that through God’s eternal plan, families can be together forever.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

O, had I but followed the arts!

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn’t reaping the lion’s share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

You’re not going to say anything about me that I’m not going to say about myself. There’s so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I’m going to say it before they can. It’s the best policy for me.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

There’s backlash about everything I do.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

I think I have always had a little humor.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

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.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

I believe that one key to success is to accept truth, no matter how it’s spoken.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Of course there are moments that you wonder how long you should be doing it because there are other aspects which are not nice, of this lifestyle. But I just love winning.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.