“Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.”

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Moonlight is sculpture.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

Unfortunately, in Hollywood, there are those directors that have some contempt for actors. We’ve all experienced that, in one way or another.

At Grinnell College, for the first time in my life, I was in an all-white setting. It was a shocking experience.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

The desire to play has always been in me. I remember my first experience at about four or five of really dying to sing and dying to play that came from no one telling me to do so.

Some of my best experiences are with writer/directors. Guy Ritchie is one. I feel they have a clearer view of what they want to do. They haven’t got to try and interpret someone’s writing; it’s all theirs. I really admire that.

From my experience and understanding, I believe money follows name and fame, while recognition calls for a huge amount of sacrifice. To get something, you have to lose something. That’s the rule of life.

As a matter of fact and experience, the more power is divided the more irresponsible it becomes.

The true Mason is ever vigilant for subtle traces of character and personality flaws which daily experience brings out.