“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”

Classic – a book which people praise and don’t read.

Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Obscurity and a competence – that is the life that is best worth living.

Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

The trouble with a movie is that it’s old before it’s released. It’s no accident that it comes in a can.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

Don’t get upset with little problems because life is like a road and problems are like speed breakers, they save us from big accidents.

There is an ambush everywhere from the army of accidents; therefore the rider of life runs with loosened reins.

By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and a Hindu only by accident of birth.

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

You weren’t an accident. You weren’t mass produced. You aren’t an assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically gifted, and lovingly positioned on the earth by the Master Craftsman.