The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.

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

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

You can stroke people with words.

The best teacher is very interactive.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

I’m guarded; I don’t talk much.

By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

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

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

When we launched a new company, I reviewed the ads and marketing materials and asked those presenting the campaign to read everything aloud to test the phrasing and concept. If I could grasp it quickly, then it passed with muster. We would get our message across only if it was understandable at first glance.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Teach a parrot the terms ‚supply and demand‘ and you’ve got an economist.

Because I know about the Holy Land, I’ve taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and – but you can’t bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

I write all my sermons.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

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

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I just think you ought to talk straight with your people.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?