In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it’s a way of experiencing the person that you’ve lost again.
ALAN ALDAFor me, I find that even though I’ve accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn’t give me a sense of satisfaction.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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I’ve never tried to manipulate my image.
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What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing.
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For humans, flying isn’t magic, it’s physics.
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Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.
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But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’
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So every day till the end of this campaign, Ill answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have a question on religion, please, go to church.
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Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are.
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I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.
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[You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you’re listening to, where you’re not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you’re actually letting them have an effect on you if they can.
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You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
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I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don’t agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.
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It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.
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People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.
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What I can’t completely understand is most other people’s fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies.
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You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.
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I’m an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger.
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Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn’t sing in tune at the time.
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Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.
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My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
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We’re highly social animals – I’m told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.
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Working on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.
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This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people’s holding beliefs other than their own?
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After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.
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It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.
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A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.
ALAN ALDA