Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

The worst men often give the best advice.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

‚Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

The art is long, life is short.