“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.”

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.

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.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It’s not as flip, irrelevant, and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right.

Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person.

In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend; but in adversity it is the most difficult of all things.

It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.

Freedom is difficult things.

Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success.

It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality.