All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Plato was a bore.

True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

The object of the superior man is truth.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Sin is geographical.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

I’m aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Character is destiny.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Be as you wish to seem.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

By indignities men come to dignities.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.