I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Life is wasted on the living.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

Words are loaded pistols.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

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.

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

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

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

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

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

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

When you give, it comes back to you.