I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

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.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

To do nothing is also a good remedy.

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

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Theology is unnecessary.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

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

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

States are not moral agents.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Forever is composed of nows.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

I take inspiration from everyone and everything. I’m inspired by current champions, former champions, true competitors, people dedicated to their dream, hard workers, dreamers, believers, achievers.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

Error is always more busy than truth.