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

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

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.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The truth is lived, not taught.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

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

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you – you – you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Homeland or death! Socialism or death! We shall overcome!

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Over the course of my career in law enforcement, I have witnessed over and over again the selflessness and sacrifice of law enforcement who lay their lives on the line every day to protect people who they will never meet and people who will never know their names.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

If you can ask a young man to give his life for his country, you can lead people.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Death is a fearful thing.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.