The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

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

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

I’ve never considered musical equipment very sacred.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

We as women, we have to understand that we know more, just even instinctively, than we think we do.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

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.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

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.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool! You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won’t have to beat him up. So that’s why I say fools, you gotta give another chance because they don’t know no better. That’s why I pity them!

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

To be social is to be forgiving.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

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

When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.