“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”

If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.

Life is a journey, but don’t worry, you’ll find a parking spot at the end.

The great secret of the successful fool is that he’s no fool at all.

Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.

Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means “I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve”. It’s easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.

My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn’t worth discussing.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream.

Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

There’s one fool at least in every married couple.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.