There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

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

Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

Science is but an image of the truth.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

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

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

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

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

In my experience, many people confuse being cowardly with being nice.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don’t understand.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.