Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

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

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many… Most of the time, I’m alone.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

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

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Real living is living for others.

There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

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

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

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.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Science is nothing but perception.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

We all have limitations. I don’t have the right genes to be an Olympic weightlifter. I don’t have the right genetics to be an Olympic sprinter. Or gymnast. Sure, if I trained my whole life, perhaps I could have become fairly decent in those sports.