Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

I don’t ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

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.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

If a whole bunch of people want to make your life a living hell, they’re gonna do it.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking lately about how boring I am. When I do get time to myself, I watch TV.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Bottom line: God will not allow any person to keep you from your destiny. They may be bigger, stronger, or more powerful, but God knows how to shift things around and get you to where you’re supposed to be.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

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.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.