If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

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

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on. And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I’m very free-spirited.

Everything popular is wrong.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘

There is nothing permanent except change.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.