“A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.”

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.

My cousin’s gay, he went to London only to find out that Big Ben was a clock.

If you look at the common denominator of all the comics who have had big success, it’s being true to their nature… that’s what takes a long time to learn.

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.

Welcome those big, sticky, complicated problems. In them are your most powerful opportunities.

Before broadcasting for 50-some years, I did TV, played 10 years in the big leagues, won a world championship – and played a big part in that, too, letting the Cardinals inject me with hepatitis. Takes a big man to do that.

A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.