By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Those Marriages generally abound most with Love and Constancy, that are preceded by a long Courtship.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

I’ve known and continue to know every one of these major world leaders by their first names, and I have access to them.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

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.

When you give, it comes back to you.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

A family shares hardships and a connected history.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.

The truth is lived, not taught.

Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.

No matter how beautiful a woman might be, you’re always threatened by certain… You’re always threatened by other women, period.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

I’ll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They’re too much fun.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.

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

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.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

If you like it you should enjoy it! Moderation in everything. If there’s things you really love, you should enjoy. You get one life, so you should enjoy it.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Yes, it is one of my ultimate aims – it is the ultimate sense of football: to make the people happy, to let them live some emotions that you usually can’t get.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

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.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

I never promise anything. I don’t promise anything to my mum. I don’t promise anything to the supporters.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

There’s a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.