Saying of the ProphetUnderstandingSpeak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.

There is a Persian proverb: 'To test that which has been tested is ignorance.' To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse.

Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.

Haste is from the Devil.

Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.

Three ThingsThree things cannot be retrieved:The arrow once sped from the bowThe word spoken in hasteThe missed opportunity.(Ali the Lion, Caliph of Islam, son-in-law of Mohammed the Prophet),

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaFlattery:One of the most promising of businesses: always brisk.

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza.Poverty: The result of marriage.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaEmotionalist:A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.

You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaIntellectual: One who knows no craft.

The mind can store an estimated ioo trillion bits of information-compared with which a computer's mere billions are virtually amnesiac.

If somehow every volunteer vanished tomorrow, so much of this country would come to a standstill: schools, hospitals and libraries. You can't name an institution that doesn't depend on volunteers.

A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.

I only go to mass when somebody asks me, but when I get in trouble I call for a priest.

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

Bowling really was a big American sport in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and then it kind of died off in the '80s.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

In time of war, the Devil makes more room in Hell.

We should just thank each other for our time. For the rest of our lives.