The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

Smiles are the language of love.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

I go to school the youth to learn the future.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

We live in a bewildering world.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that’s odd, but I think it’s odd if artists aren’t interested in the world around them. I’m always chasing that.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.

We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

Science is nothing but perception.

When you think about it, three of our biggest financial decisions in life are made at times of peak emotional excitement: deciding to get married, buying a home, and having kids.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.