To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

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

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

I’m one of the most adaptable guys I know in as much as travelling is my favourite thing to do in life. With every place I go, I try to stay there long enough to do it justice, long enough so that I can at least imagine what it would be like to live there. Once I imagine that, then it’s OK for me to return home.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

I loved the fact that Obama is multi-racial. I thought that was terrific, as my wife is the same racial make-up.

Many admire, few know.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else’s. I’m not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I’m all about.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Not all those who wander are lost.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

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

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.