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.
ALAN ALDAWe’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.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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I’m very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they’re making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.
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Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself.
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People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.
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It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.
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Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?
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When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.
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The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.
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But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.
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Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.
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There are two things that I get a lot of pleasure from in my life, and that is, doing what I know how to do well – that really makes me happy.
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I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.
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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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Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.
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Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.
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I don’t talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it’s something personal – more than personal, it’s private.
ALAN ALDA