There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

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.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

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.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

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

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Being is the great explainer.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

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

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

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.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

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

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.