No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child.

The usual designation of the magnitude scale to my name does less than justice to the great part that Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale to apply to earthquakes in all parts of the world.

Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.

Don't wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.

As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.

Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes

The rose does not bloom without thorns. True, but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose.

Spring makes everything young again except man.

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.

Be proud of your Latino culture and do the best work you can do, and you will always succeed.

If you're built like a freight train, you can't drive around like a Volkswagen.

Is it me or is President Bush's life starting to sound like a country song. He's from Texas, his dog just died, and it looks like he might lose his job. Next thing, his truck is going to break down.

I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

Singing really oxygenates your blood. You stretch your lungs and take in much more air into them than before. It's really good for your health.

It's strange that so many people think it's glamorous and fun to be on a set, I guess it shows they do a good job of hiding reality!

She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.

Make movies you love because it's miserable. Every movie I've worked on at one point or another is exhausting, and you feel like you're making a bad movie.

Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theatre.