Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.

I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don't tell him the truth. Others won't do it.

But, the relationships that I see work - As long as they're telling the truth, and saying the things that you don't ever want to have to say to another human being.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.