I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!

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

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

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

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

I’m nobody, who are you?

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

The astronomer will believe that the most erratic comet will yet accomplish its journey and revisit our sphere; but we give up those for lost who have not wandered one-half the distance from the centre of light and life.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Life is anything but predictable.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

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

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

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

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Nature is not human hearted.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.