Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Every man is his own hell.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

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.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

Sometimes, people can be extraordinarily judgmental and closed-minded to anyone different or special, which is why it’s so hard for young people in this day and age to be comfortable enough in their own skin to not listen to the people picking on them.

The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Life is precious.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

If you stop struggling, then you stop life.

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

Life is too short not to celebrate nice moments!

I love diversity.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.