Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

My life is a struggle.

Death is the king of this world: ‚Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

I have such incredible experiences in my life.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

I don’t think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn’t at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

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

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.

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.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

There is no wealth but life.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. When we are born we cry, that we are come to this great state of fools.

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

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.