You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

It’s not easy being young. It’s hard to know what to do.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

We live in ugly times.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Players today moan about the number of games, but when you’re young, you can’t play enough.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

An economically peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka is the dream of youth of the nation. My message for the youth is to collectively work for an inclusively developed Sri Lanka.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

I want to try something different in Hollywood, to tell the audience I am not just an actor star – I am an actor, too.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.