“We confuse money with actual wealth.”

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.

The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.

Only doubtful truths need defense.

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.

I’m more of a cringer at first and when it is years down the road and out of my way, I can actually appreciate it somehow.

Things happen differently when you’re actually here, so you can’t put out a general guideline that’s gonna show up in text and be interpreted. There are no rules. Just be yourself.

The one you actually get to do when you’re filming, and then the one you wish you would have done, afterward.

Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen – that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen.

I was quite emotional when I finished my lap, but had to wait for other drivers to cross the line to hear whether I’d actually done it.

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.