Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

If you’re a politician, you might want to learn the Buddhist way of negotiation. Restoring communication and bringing back reconciliation is clear and concrete in Buddhism.

Morality is contraband in war.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Gold is good in its place; but loving, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

When you stand for something, you’ve got to stand for it all the way, not half way.

I am the son of a freedom fighter, and a son of a freedom fighter automatically imbibes the value of democracy.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

If I’ve got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to call them up, and I’m going to say, ‚Hey, here’s what’s going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn’t expect it. Now it’s going to take me some more time to get you what you need.‘ But I’m going to do that upfront.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Coffee is a language in itself.

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it’s always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

I haven’t gone out of my way to seek advice from people I don’t know.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.

A good name is rather to be chosen than riches.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

When the players go home, I can’t tell them what to do, so you need to create an atmosphere of trust. I don’t want to think, ‚What are they doing now? Do I need to call them?‘

Character, not circumstances, makes the man.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

I’m an emotional person.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

The more you know the less you need to say.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.