The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

What goes up must come down.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

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.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Death is the king of this world: ‚Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.