Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‚What should I do?‘ And I say: ‚Act. Do something.‘ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

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.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

The wisest have the most authority.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

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.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Nature is not human hearted.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

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

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

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

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.