Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

Sleep is all about recovering. So if you’re not sleeping, you’re not recovering. And if you’re going to break your body down a lot, you better find ways to build it back up. And the only way to do that is get a lot of sleep. So for me, I go to bed at like 8:30, 9:00. As soon as I put my kids to bed. Because I’m up at 5:30 the next day.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Throw off your worries when you throw off your clothes at night.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

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 see the world not as it is, but as we are.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

The only thing I ever wanted to be was a professional football player.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

I’ve never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a ‚fat cat‘ and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a ‚public-spirited philanthropist‘.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch – which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.