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

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

I would never exchange my life with anybody else’s.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

The brain is wider than the sky.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

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.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

I’ve never considered musical equipment very sacred.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.