It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Eight years ago, you may remember Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year and a half. Let me tell you, it was tough, because Hillary was tough. I was worn out. She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers, it was backwards in heels.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

To live is to think.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

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

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

He has the most who is most content with the least.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Science is nothing but perception.

I have this really high priority on happiness and finding something to be happy about.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married – we became an interracial couple.

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

There’s no happier person than a truly thankful, content person.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

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

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‚Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.‘

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.