People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‚You can do better than this.‘

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

I hear my friends and my mom tell me I’m special, but honestly, I still don’t get it.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

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 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.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

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

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.

As the father of eight children, I’m quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries – it’s the I that’s in the ever-changing body.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

I could never give relationship advice to anybody!

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

I have goals.

You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself.

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

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

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

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.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.