There are no facts, only interpretations.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

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?

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Man is a universe within himself.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

There is nothing permanent except change.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Sin is geographical.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

I’ve never considered musical equipment very sacred.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.