Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Girls talk to each other like men talk to each other. But girls have an eye for detail.

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

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

I write all my sermons.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

You can only have one aim per debate.

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about; what they care about is the picture.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

What can I say? I’m a talker.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.