For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Choose people who lift you up.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

I’ve watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it’s because they tend to believe all the hype that’s out there. I don’t think there’s that much hype about me.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

Transforming yourself into a deep listener will not only prove more amusing as you open your mind to their mind, but you will gain the most invaluable lessons about human psychology.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

When I was younger, I felt pressure to become someone else once I became successful.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

It’s a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.

Complaining is dangerous business. It can damage or even destroy your relationship with God, your relationships with other people, and even with your relationship with yourself.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

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.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.

I don’t have all the answers.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I’m learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, ‚I can’t go to Kmart. I can’t take my kids to the haunted house.‘

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

I didn’t leave bodybuilding until I felt that I had gone as far as I could go. It will be the same with my film career. When I feel the time is right, I will then consider public service. I feel that the highest honor comes from serving people and your country.