The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

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

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

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.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness – that there is something wrong.

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

We must ensure that technology is accessible, affordable, and adds value.

The worst men often give the best advice.

I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans – because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

I’ll be judged on the body of work and not the popularity of any one decision.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

It’s easy to become very self-critical when you’re an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.

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.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

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.

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

I never give advice unless someone asks me for it. One thing I’ve learned, and possibly the only advice I have to give, is to not be that person giving out unsolicited advice based on your own personal experience.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.