Ambition devours gold and drinks blood and climbs so high by other men's heads, that at the length in the fall, it breaks its own neck; therefore, it is better to live in humble content than in high care and trouble.
If I could play the ukulele like Zooey Deschanel, I would find my own personal M. Ward, and we would do a side album; but I don't, you know?
But to personally satisfy my own adrenalin needs, I've been racing cars a little bit, which has been fun.
I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.
You have to figure out ways to do things on your own. I do my own thing, and I don't pay much attention to what anyone else is doing.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
From my own point of view, I hope everybody would realise that people who work in Scottish football - referees included - are always under terrific scrutiny.
I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
I am more comfortable on set than I am in my own home.
I used to just write about my own apathy, but that youthful, apathetic way of looking at things grew thin as I got older.
Even if my film does well, you will not see me blowing my own trumpet. There is no time to sit and dwell on whether it's done well or not done well.
I'm a really nostalgic person. I love taking photos and video and having memories. I remember all my childhood videos that my dad used to take. I think that's really what life is about - especially when you start a family of your own.
I feel like my biggest competition is myself. A lot of kids get caught up in the comparing game - comparing themselves with Michael Jackson, comparing themselves with Michael Jordan. You gotta be your best. You gotta overcome your own fears.
No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.
As a senior in high school, you figure out what you want to do with your life. I asked myself if I wanted to get back into acting and thought: 'Yes, but under my own terms and nothing like it was before.'
Living the life I have lived - being raised by deaf parents, assimilating to a different culture, and the challenges I have faced over time - has given me insight to the fact that each person has their own complex, intricate story, and it's rarely what I suspect it is. We must have compassion and grace for each other. We must.
Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
I am a free man. I do not need to copy Petrarca or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry themselves about style, and so cease to be themselves. Without a master, without a model, without a guide, I go to work and earn my living, my well-being and my fame.
Surely no child should fear his own father - especially a priesthood father. A father's duty is to make his home a place of happiness and joy.
I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.
There's not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They're out there. But I'm one of them who's just continued on, following his own little inner madness.
It's flattering that there are lots of Internet fan sites about me. I'm a bit of a technophobe and I don't even own a laptop, but it's probably a good thing I'm not logged on, checking up on what everyone is saying about me.
From the beginning, each human embryo has its own unique genetic identity.
I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.
I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.
Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.
When it comes to our cultural values, I would love to hold on to the past because Nokia had some of the best spirit ever. Having grown up in the company, I loved it for the value and culture, which matched my own.
If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?
A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.
Tourism is a very big economic benefit to the Sherpa people, and also, they have very strong ties to their own social attitudes and their own religion, so fortunately, they're not too influenced by many of our Western attitudes.
Freedom is control in your own life.
Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.
A lot of producers get famous because they decide to be superstars for their own reasons, but I'm inspired by Timbaland and Pharrell and Swizz Beatz 'cause they're doing things that are so different. I like how they're introducing ideas I never would have thought of.
Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.
It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.
