Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

When you give, it comes back to you.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

It is our future on the line, and we must at least have a say in it.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

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.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

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

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Nature does nothing in vain.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

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.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Soon, I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.