“You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.”

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Civilization begins with distillation

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

Almost everybody that’s well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

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.

I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

That will get us all to our common goals of protecting our world for future generations.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.