We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

What one fool can understand, another can.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

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

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn’t care about suffering. I always did.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

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 or obscured by mortal power.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

My mother told me, ‚Son, nobody else but God knows.‘ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.