We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.

An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment - his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego.

I live before the audience of One-before others I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to prove.

Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.

Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

I spend a lot of time upside down. It increases the blood flow to the brain, so it really helps your creativity.

Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.

In our day it's worse to judge evil than to do evil.

What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.

No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.

I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.

Over the years, during television interviews, whenever the host or the reviewer or whoever gets cynical and nasty with me, I will behave accordingly. I will defend myself.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.

To fully enjoy life, to derive its greatest meaning and beauty, one needs to enter into it with not only the look of involvement and happiness, but the spirit of involvement as well.

Memphis are a big part of who I am, but it's still just a part

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

There are gains for all our losses, There are balms for all our pain: But when youth, the dream, departs, It takes something from our hearts, And it never comes again.