Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

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.

I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Only he can take great resolves who has indomitable faith in God and has fear of God.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

I’ve had the good fortune and blessing to run for the offices for which I really wanted to do the work.

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

We’re not like robots. God promises to guide us through the Holy Spirit, but He gives us the freedom to make our own decisions.

Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‚Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.‘

Even more amazing than modern technology is our opportunity to access information directly from Heaven, without hardware, software, or monthly service fees.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

You just have to have a simple faith.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

Prayer is a confession of one’s own unworthiness and weakness.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

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.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

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

Heaven means to be one with God.

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.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Most of us have hoped and prayed for something to happen a certain way, but it didn’t. And when this happened, we had a choice to make: to react with offense toward God or to trust Him anyway.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.