When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

I don’t think I would be interested in the climate at all if I had been like everyone else.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized – never knowing.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‚continent,‘ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

I think for my bones and my size, I better stay with my 60 kilo.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

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

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.

Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Time stays, we go.

I’ve always been really, really aware of my insecurities – really, really aware. I never developed that thick skin that keeps you from letting things get to you.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

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

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.