To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

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

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

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

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

There’s always going to be people who don’t understand or accept the united science, and I will just ignore them, as I’m only acting and communicating on the science.

We should understand the source of our authority and something of the keys that control its power.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

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

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

On a spiritual level, it’s as though with my sighted eye I see what’s before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what’s hidden. It’s illuminated life more than darkened it.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.