There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I am absolutely my own biggest critic.

My public is growing up just as I am. After all, I’m not 19 anymore and if I stick with the sex bit, who will be paying to see me when I’m 50?

You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty clever. But there’s a lot that you hone in on when you finish your education.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap – it is all in the mind.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

What we live by we die by.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I think what’s important is for us to decipher what is honest and what is dishonest and be accepting of those things and not operating from fear.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

A woman knows by intuition, or instinct, what is best for herself.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

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.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

We think too much and feel too little.

I put my flaws on front street. So the world accepted my flaws, so I don’t have any flaws.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I’m getting a wrinkle above my eyebrow because I just can’t stop lifting it, and I love that you know.

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.