“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”

“Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.”

“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.”

“The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.”

“Music is essentially useless, as life is.”

“faith in the intellect...is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits”

“To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.”

“In his biggest sacrifices, man finds the biggest fulfillment”

“Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends : have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.”

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.”

“Life is an art not to be learned by observation.”

“Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence.”

“For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings.”

“He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel)”

“Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous.”

“At the prompting of some stray instinct or chance association, you will invent delightful or fearsome circumstances, identifying them, with the most shameful doubleness, with the real ones...you will burst into passionate eloquence, or pant in the direst predicament, all for the fun of it, or by virtue of a terrible inner compulsion; and this dream which is byplay, or play which is a waking dream, will exhibit your brooding soul, if not always to moral advantage or with much coherence, at least in its unsuspected ingenuities of invention. What brilliant images, what subtle emotions, what dramatic turns in the argument of a dream, and in the make-believe of children! You seem to dictate and compose your fiction deliberately, rejecting, foreseeing, feeling the oncoming revolution towards which circumstances must be addressed.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

“The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.”

“Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.”

“….ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.”

“Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.”

“And perhaps, those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center are niche experience, they are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

“If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life.”

“If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.”

“If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.”

“I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.”

“Working with Woody [Allen] is like an emotional strip club without the cash.”

“Someone might have a germ of talent, but 90 percent of it is discipline and how you practice it, what you do with it. ... Instinct won't carry you through the entire journey. It's what you do in the moments between inspiration.”

“If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state.”

“It was only when I realized how actors have the power to move people that I decided to pursue acting as a career.”

“I don't have a sense of entitlement or that I deserve this. You'd be surprised at the lack of competition between nominees - I think a lot of it's imposed from the outside. Can I have my champagne now?”

“All cities do face similar, significant trends in the future... most importantly global warming and climate change.”

“An actress once advised me, 'Make sure you do your own laundry - it will keep you honest.'”

“Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned and we should not turn a blind eye to them.”

“Mind the gap - it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.”

“I think Pilates is great, especially when you can do it with a trainer who keeps you on track.”

“You can't be trying to make a film that pleases all people, you know, so it's not a concern of mine.”

“When you're a performer, of course you want an audience, but it's very, very different from courting fame.”

“Marriage is a risk; I think it's a great and glorious risk, as long as you embark on the adventure in the same spirit.”

“I think marriage is all about timing. Getting married is insanity; I mean, it's a risk - who knows if you're going to be together forever? But you both say, 'We're going to take this chance, in the same spirit.”

“I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.”

We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.”

When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.”

For me, I think the bigger something is, the more difficult it is to make it nimble and fleet afoot.”

“It's not just women in film, 18-year-old girls feel pressure to do preventative injecting. I see someone's face, someone's body who has had children and I think, they're the song lines of your experience, and why would you want to eradicate that? I look at people sort of entombing themselves and all you see is their little pin holes of terror... and you think, just live your life, death is not going to be any easier just because your face can't move.”

To those who voted for me, thank you. And to those who didn't, better luck next year!”

If you only exercise your soloist muscles, the other muscles quickly atrophy.

“I'm not focused on what other people think of me.”

“I'm always without sleep. I've got two kids. I understand sleep deprivation on a profound level.”

“I believe that a creative career is only as good as the risks that you take with it.”