Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

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.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

I like to be myself, and I don’t pretend. For instance, I don’t dress up for occasions; I am what I am.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.

Information is not knowledge.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

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.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

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

I’ve never been one to sit back and go, ‚I’d better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don’t want to lose them.‘

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

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.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

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

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.