Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

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.

To innovate is not to reform.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

There are many things that I don’t understand.

The worst men often give the best advice.

I don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

I love to watch times change!

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

Life is a dead-end street.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

My life is real.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

Life is a song to me.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Life is anything but predictable.