Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Getting organized in the normal routines of life and finishing little projects you’ve started is an important first step toward realizing larger goals. If you can’t get a handle on the small things, how will you ever get it together to focus on the big things?

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright.

I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

We record when I have a hole in the schedule. Sometimes night, sometimes afternoon, sometimes morning – we fit it in when we can. I prep for episodes all the time.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

I’m a people pleaser. I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

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?

The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention. You don’t look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you’re listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‚elephant‘.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.