Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

I’m 5’11, so when I wear heels, it’s definitely a really good view that I have. I’m, like, 6’2 when I wear heels, so I tend to wear cowboy boots a lot.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

There is nothing your highest self wants more than peace. This peace makes you feel worthy of all of the richest blessings of the universe, and when you radiate this out into the world, it is returned to you without fail.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.