Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

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

Thought is the parent of the deed.

The way to know life is to love many things.

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

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

If a whole bunch of people want to make your life a living hell, they’re gonna do it.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

An overflow of good converts to bad.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

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

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.