A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

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?

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It’s just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

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

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‚know‘ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

Our life is made by the death of others.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

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

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

Time itself comes in drops.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.