Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

I’ve watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it’s because they tend to believe all the hype that’s out there. I don’t think there’s that much hype about me.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Facts are stubborn things.

Life is a song to me.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

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.

I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.

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?

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

I only see clearly what I remember.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

Life is our dictionary.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

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

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

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.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

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.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.