Alan Quotes

That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.

Folk Music is the map of singing.

Thought is a means of concealing Truth.

f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

There's no such thing as an unsent Christian. You have already been SENT.

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.

I am a man of principle. I will stick by my principles. I will tell the truth no matter where the chips fall.

Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing - but none of them serious.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.

My films are about embarrassment.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

If America has the right to target Osama bin Laden, or terrorists, of course Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

Science teaches you to open your eyes and appreciate the reality around you. Religion teaches you to close your eyes and cling to the fantasy within you.

Work may be your dominant thought, and joy an afterthought. But joy is your true purpose, and work the afterthought.

The menu is not the meal.

I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

The shamanic realm is to get you out of the word set. For skeptics, that's impossible, and they just can't see that and it just makes no sense.

Acts that proceed from your calm center are always more effective than acts that proceed from fear, guilt, or anger.

Pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness.