Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

Death wasn’t part of God’s original plan for humanity, and the Bible calls death an enemy – the last enemy to be destroyed.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

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

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

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

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

An unused life is an early death.

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

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

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

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged – to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‚If wet, in the library.‘ Who could say that this is bad?

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

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.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.