Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

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

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

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

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

She laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.

Since the very beginning, Emeril’s had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Laughter is America’s most important export.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

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.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

People say I look so happy – and I say, ‚That’s the Botox.‘

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

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.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.