It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

It’s funny; recently I’ve started to notice people’s impersonations of me, and it’s basically like a hyperactive child.

Even now I will go to, like, an industry event, and all the ladies will be over here and all the guys over here, and I will go to the guys‘ table and sit because I just feel I can have a much better conversation over there. And that’s automatic; it’s not prejudice.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

I’ve learned people are watching, so don’t do nothing stupid.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

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.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

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.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

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?

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive.

My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They’re taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

When I came to Delhi and noticed an insider view, I felt what it was, and I was surprised to see it. It seemed as if dozens of separate governments are running at the same time in one main government. It appeared that everyone has its own fiefdom.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

If you look at me close enough, there’s a small resemblance to a chicken nugget. I don’t know if it’s my skin texture or my hair, but the resemblance is definitely there.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty… it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

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

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.