Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

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

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

From caring comes courage.

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

History is more or less bunk.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

No one but a fool is always right.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

It’s never crowded along the extra mile.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what’s really happened.

Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.

If you would judge, understand.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are easy as an old shoe are generally of little worth.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

What one fool can understand, another can.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

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

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

Each doctor makes a much, much more important job than I do, but at the end, nobody talks about him. We all know about it, but we don’t really think about it.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

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