As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Through the ages, many of His children have had access to the blessings of the gospel, but many more have not.

Without discipline, there’s no life at all.

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I’m still quite robust.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

If you spend your life competing with business men, what do you have? A bank account and ulcers!

I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you – you – you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I always ask God to work through me and let me be a light of some kind and help in this world, so I always pray for that, and I always want to do good.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

Hell is other people.

It is important to remember yourself.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher,‘ ‚Prophet,‘ ‚Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. You have to make a choice on that.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Don’t say I hate institutionalised religion – rather than saying I hate those things, which I do not, what I’m saying is that perhaps there is a way of opening more doors, rather than closing so many.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

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.

As a member of the Church, you have made sacred covenants with the Lord.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

If you want to deal with an epidemic – crime or health – the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

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 cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Life must be lived as play.

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.

Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that’s very important for good health.