Samuel Johnson

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Unless you know who you are, you will always be vulnerable to what people say.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

It’s just a matter of managing expectations. So for me, for example, you know, when your husband is President of the United States and you have children, something has got to give. I’ve made compromises in my life and my career, but I’ve also, in exchange, gained a wonderful platform to do some great work.

We’re so afraid of each other… Colour, wealth, these things that don’t really matter still play too much of a role in how we see one another. And it’s sad, because the thing that least defines us is the colour of our skin.

If I was on the air and was just kind of a plain-vanilla personality that took the safe road and the safe way trying to please all of the people all of the time, I’d been gone in two weeks.

The partnership of mind and matter is one which has existed since the beginning of time and cannot be dissolved.

It is just good practice to do a situational scan and have situational awareness when you are out in the world.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.

I haven’t put a pencil to a piece of paper, working out a problem, in years; I do it in my head.

Zen teaches that if we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform and lighten up about it.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.

I’ve always thought that each person invented himself… for whatever reason, through whatever circumstance, through whatever he is gone through… that we are each a figment of our own imagination… And some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.