When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Often, in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

A person hears only what they understand.

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.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. ‚A miracle a minute‘ would not be a bad slogan for God.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It’s on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

At first, I was called a quack, a charlatan, and worse, year after year, in Australia, England and the United States, by men who simply refused to believe that a nurse from ‚the bush‘ could devise a treatment which succeeded where they had failed.

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

Being is the great explainer.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

My favorite mode of transport is hot-air ballooning. It’s so graceful to be blown by the wind, to go where the wind takes you.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.