Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

You just have to have a simple faith.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Science is nothing but perception.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Words are loaded pistols.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

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.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

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.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

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

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

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.