One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

There is no unique picture of reality.

When things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that’s going to come from it.

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

On a spiritual level, it’s as though with my sighted eye I see what’s before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what’s hidden. It’s illuminated life more than darkened it.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

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.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

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.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

There is so much that people take for granted.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

Maturity is the ability to reap without apology and not complain when things don’t go well.