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.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Where there is love there is life.

In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Change alone is unchanging.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

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

We all want to win more, but it’s all about being blessed and embracing your blessings. We have life.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

Plato was a bore.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

India has to be transformed into a developed nation, a prosperous nation and a healthy nation, with a value system.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

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.

I’ve had no contact with my daughter for years. That’s her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don’t want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.