Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

A good laugh is sunshine in the house.

There is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Prospering just doesn’t have to do with money.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Maria is the best reason to come home.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

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.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

Man is by nature a political animal.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

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.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

My wife and I are very affectionate.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.