How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

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

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‚walking.‘

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

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

Non-violence is the article of faith.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

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

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Man is a universe within himself.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

They’re right to think that about me, because I’m the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.