I have wondered about time all my life.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Change alone is unchanging.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

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?

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Dissents speak to a future age.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Nature abhors annihilation.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

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

There is nothing permanent except change.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

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

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

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

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

The object of the superior man is truth.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Time discovers truth.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.