Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

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

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

You can’t just have slogans, you can’t just have catchy phrases. You have to have an agenda. And I think what the Republican Party has to do, if it’s going to incorporate the tea party efforts in it, is to come up with an agenda that the American people can see, touch, and actually believe in, and something they believe in.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

I have been a firm believer in the federal structure of our country as enshrined in the Constitution.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

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

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn’t have to go so fast.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

Anything I’ve ever said, I certainly was feeling at the time.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

Desire is the very essence of man.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

You don’t see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

Religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings. The two things are inseparable.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.