Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

Always say ‚yes‘ to the present moment… Surrender to what is. Say ‚yes‘ to life – and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you.

More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other’s well-being, is source of happiness.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

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

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

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.

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

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

By indignities men come to dignities.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

I saw a picture of myself when I came out of the hospital. I didn’t recognize myself.

I owe my solitude to other people.

Theology is unnecessary.

Forever is composed of nows.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.