When I ceased to accept the teaching of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head.

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

I believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak.

The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

In the 10th century, Baghdad instituted a licensing exam that all doctors had to take before practicing as physicians

If you know the correct path then lost people are your responsibility.

I am a bit obsessive about tidiness. I need to make my bed in the morning and leave it perfectly made up.

I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.

I've never had food in my fridge. All I have in my fridge is one shelf of Canada Dry ginger ale, Diet Cokes on the next shelf, and ZeroWater on the next shelf. That is it.

The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.

I wish that I myself did have faith in God, that I had a religion, sometimes. But not always.

Too many expedients may spoil an affair. [Fr., Le trop d'expedients peut gater une affaire.]

We make the kind of movies we like to watch. I love to laugh. I love to be amazed by how beautiful it is. But I also love to be moved to tears. There's lots of heart in our films.

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."