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.
ALAN ALDAWhen I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for ‘Scientific American Frontiers.’
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As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.
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They’re supposed to be gigantic explosions and they’re just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are.
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I’ve sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I’ve helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes;
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Loneliness is everything it’s cracked up to be.
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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.
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War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.
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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others.
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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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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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I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel.
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You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.
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That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.
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For a while in my teens, I was sure I had it. It was about getting to heaven. If heaven existed and lasted forever, then a mere lifetime spent scrupulously following orders was a small investment for an infinite payoff.
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How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at some place that you’re familiar with?
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I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.
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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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There’s plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.
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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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Begin challenging your own assumptions.
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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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Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.
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It’s always better to be wise than to be smart.
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I’m not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn’t interest me.
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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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If I can’t get the girl, at least give me more money.
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