The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

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.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

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

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it’s so important to me. It’s hard to hear that people think I’m not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I’m nuts.

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.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Perception often lags behind reality, and I can say from experience that the vast majority of public officials in Louisiana are much better than our reputation holds us to be.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

When I was a young kid, I did not even dream about playing for my country. It was such a farfetched thing to play for India.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

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

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

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

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.