He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Children are all foreigners.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

I always have an optimistic view, no matter what it is.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It’s just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action, which produces further confusion, further misery.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.