How Quotes

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.

Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting.

How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we'd profit from them.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

We measure our days out in steps of uncertainty not turning to see how far we've come. And peer down the highway from here to eternity and reach out for love on the run.

Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad, and that's why I call you dad, because you are so special to me. You taught me the game and you taught me how to play it right.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

It's hard to tell how far women's individuality has come in the past twenty years.

Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.

Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

Before I had kids I'd go out on the road for months and months at a time, but now I don't think I'd want to do that anymore, because I'd miss too much time at home, so it's just a matter of monitoring how much work that I do and how much time I'm on the road.

A lot of very beautiful women can be a pain because all they're thinking about is how they look.

I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.

It isn't enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, 'How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?'

It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.

I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.