Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

It is natural to die as to be born.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

It may be possible to gild pure gold, but who can make his mother more beautiful?

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

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

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

I put cocoa butter all over my face and my iconic belly and my arms and legs. Why live rough? Live smooth.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Reality is a sliding door.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

The earth laughs in flowers.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

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

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

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.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

To live is to think.

States are not moral agents.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.