J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

I never take that for granted, but I'm always very aware that I'm one person and I can't wear everything.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

As long as I am this or that, I am not all things.

For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.

I am who I am. I am not very complicated. I am simple and an introvert.

Really, I think the biggest thing is just playing your game and doing what you do.

When you've worked as hard as I have to form your identity, the last thing you want is to blur where you end and someone else begins.

There are things I cannot do, costumes I cannot wear. When I have taken stands on things, it is because I have thought carefully about them.

I don't really have a strategy other than to just be myself.

I am no one's role model.

I tune it all out because if I let other people's stress get to me, then I stress myself out more than I need to.

I don't think I am fearless. I am just me.

My momma told me a long time ago, 'not everybody has to like you.' And it's very true. I'm ok with that.

I have one rule I live by: Only do what you can do. That neans you're never looking outside for what's popular; you're always looking inside for what's true.

I can only show what I have received from the characters. That's what's scary because you're never going to be everyone's taste and you don't want to let people down. But, I can only do what I can do.

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone –as it seems to me– is in danger.

I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.

The hardest thing in the world is to stand alone. Your friends will not understand, will resent you, will want you to just stop it and let life go back to where it was. But you have to follow the quiet turning of your own considered conscience. It's a hard road.

Don't get caught up in other people's expectations. Don't take anything for granted, either.

Vulnerability is something that I negotiate every day.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.