Quotes from Alan Alda

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

For some reason, leatherbound copies of the goings-on in Congress lined the shelves of our living room, and I pored over them when I was 12. I had never read anything so funny," Alda said. "From then on, I knew I wanted to do comedy.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

I came to the conclusion that, even in life, unless I'm responding with my whole self—unless, in fact, I'm willing to be changed by you—I'm probably not really listening. But if I do listen—openly, naïvely, and innocently—there's a chance, possibly the only chance, that a true dialogue and real communication will take place between us.

You have to leave the city of your comfort ano into the wilderness of your intuition. what you'll discover will be woderful. what you'll discover will be yourself.

The trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven't been asked.

Maybe God is the ultimate bully who teases us with life, then pulls it out of reach. Maybe there's nothing I can do but let life curl up and disappear like an old photograph. Or maybe I can get it back. Maybe imagination gets it back. Perhaps play lets it breath again.

Starting with a gray cloud of brain cells that was subject to storms and flash floods, I had to learn to make my own internal weather.

Aren't we lucky to be us?

I was what came to mind when there was blood on the floor.

Allowing this childish curiosity to continue on my whole life has given me a sense of satisfaction, and maybe even a sense of meaning. No matter how old I get I have the feeling that if I can keep this curiosity flame lit I will see the world in a way that never gets stale ... life will have a taste that delights

Dar acum, in loc de ratiune, multa lume se foloseste de dorinte, vise, mantre si incantatii. Incearca sa se vindece folosind cristale, magneti si ierburi cu proprietati necunoscute. Ti se ofera o pastila facuta din frunza unei plante necunoscute si ti se spune: "Ia-o, n-are cum sa-ti faca rau, e naturala." Dar naturala e si matraguna.

Not being truly engaged with the people we're trying to communicate with, and then suffering the snags of misunderstanding, is the grit in the gears of daily life.

Even when we think of empathy as a tool for good, it might not be a good idea to oversell its strengths, and we should remember that there will always be people who will use it against others for their own benefit.

If a rattlesnake thinks he can swallow a mouse, he probably can. Don't assume you think like a snake unless you are one.

Anesthetized by youth, I missed it.

I hope they'll pay attention not so much to the mechanical things, like a sudden change of pace in a talk or a sudden change in volume of their voice. I hope they'll pay attention, instead, to the fundamental source of that pacing and volume, which is the connection with the other person. That connection makes us respond like a leaf in the breeze to whatever is happening in the faces of those in front of us.