Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

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.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

The good is the beautiful.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

I want people to understand they have to live their own lives the way they want to and not just do what we do.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

I want to reform the tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 – the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

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.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

I don’t have to show anything to anyone. There is nothing to prove.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.