I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

My friends ask me if I want more kids, and I always say yes, I want more; it’s the best thing you can have in your life.

Life is warfare.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

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

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

International summits and organisations like WTO take decisions, which will bind us, and if we are not present in such summits, we may be hurt by the decisions taken.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

My biographers… would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided… to flip the order.

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.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

If I think too hard about a relationship, I’ll talk myself out of it.

People want to go out and travel around and meet cool people. I could just go live in Vermont, but is that what I really want?

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

If I had chosen the populist course, it would have been a breach of the trust placed in me by the people.

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.

Forever is composed of nows.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

We should work with the principle that a work that can be done at a lower level should never be escalated to a higher level.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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 suppose that’s one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

When you get angry, your options narrow.

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

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.