If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

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

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness – that there is something wrong.

Respect is one of life’s greatest treasures. I mean, what does it all add up to if you don’t have that?

If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

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

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

The future will be better tomorrow.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

While we may lose heart, we never have to lose hope.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Words are loaded pistols.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

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.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

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.

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.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Death is a fearful thing.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.