“Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.”

And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.

I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.

You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea.

And when the other half get the idea it does no good to work because somebody’s going to get what I work for. That, dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

And when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I’ve heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

The problem to me with environmentalism is the idea that we’re all gonna die and we need to save ourselves.

I’m a filmmaker, I’m a storyteller, an entertainer, if you will, so what can I do to participate?