As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Reality is a sliding door.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Dissents speak to a future age.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

I made my fair share of mistakes.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

I’ve been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It’s a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.

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.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

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

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Words are loaded pistols.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

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?

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.