We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

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

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be… a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

I’ve been blessed with talents to play this game and been put on a stage to impact a lot of people. I don’t want to take that for granted.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

I call architecture frozen music.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

Without gambling, I would not exist.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

I urge everyone to be trendsetters for Azza Suleiman. Let’s make it one fashion which everyone will want to follow.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

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

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

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

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

As an entrepreneur, I have been known for taking risks throughout my career, but leaving the European Union is not one of the risks I would want the U.K. to take – not as an investor, not as a father, and not as a grandfather. I am deeply concerned about the impact of leaving.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: You have ceded them power.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them.

I did this book ‚Harvest for Hope,‘ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

Remember that the essence of authority is that people willingly follow your lead.

I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.