Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

In business, experience is the big teacher.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.

As good and as smart as you may be, no one knows everything. I truly wish I was as smart as I thought I was when I started my first company.

I realised years ago that no one really knows what they're doing and you kind of just learn by observing.

People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

What's an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows he doesn't know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn't admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn't really know how much.

Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one's being.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

People are looking for certainty. The more complex the world becomes, the more people look for people to give them certainty and tell them what to do. During the past few years of actively thinking about this, there is one thing that I have accepted: certainty is not out there. There is not one strategy to follow, and that's OK.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

I'm a work in progress. You know, my kids didn't come with instructions... and neither did this business, so when I put the two of them together, I gotta take it a little at a time.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

The best wisdom is earned through experience, particularly mistakes.

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment.

At the end of the day, none of us are the Oracle of Delphi, so we don't get everything right. It's always good to be able to listen and to take on what seems to be the right thing to do.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Sometimes I'm wrong, sometimes not. But I'm an instinctual player.

The more you learn, the more you learn you don't know.