I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.

A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.

You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.

Thou art sore troubled in mind for the people in the world’s sake: loves thou that people better than he that made them?

We had won the war, but when the insurgency reared its ugly head, we lost everything we had gained.

Youth is as easily wasted as a fine wine consumed by a drunken man. There is no poetry in aging, and Javert lived out the process in its most hideous iteration.

When you say a situation or a person is hopeless you are slamming the door in the face of God.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room each believing himself in mortal peril from the other who he assumes to have perfect vision.

... she indulged in melancholy - that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries.

Perseverance is not a passive submission to circumstances-it is a strong and active response to the difficult events of life.

My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

I have stopped being a misanthrope.

It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.