Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?… It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Plato was a bore.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

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

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

I’ve never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some. But I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

The important thing is that men should have a purpose in life. It should be something useful, something good.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Commodities such as gold and silver have a world market that transcends national borders, politics, religions, and race. A person may not like someone else’s religion, but he’ll accept his gold.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.