All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Our life is made by the death of others.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

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

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate… The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Life is warfare.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Sin is geographical.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.