All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I’ve already accomplished something. It’s such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

If we weren’t all crazy, we’d just go insane.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Forever is composed of nows.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

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

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

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

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

I can’t tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I’ve got a good bead on myself.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

I am not the humblest person in the world. I admit that.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

Life is wasted on the living.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.