No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Truth is what works.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

Obedience to God is the pathway to the life you really want to live.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

I think Bible principles are principles for life.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

For victory in life, we’ve got to keep focused on the goal, and the goal is Heaven.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

God does not play dice.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.