I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

I’ve been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

It sometimes feels like a strange movie, you know, it’s all so weird that sometimes I wonder if it is really happening.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

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

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

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.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

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.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

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

Death is the king of this world: ‚Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

And die of nothing but a rage to live.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‚know‘ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t want to open up my cornflakes and find that they’re full of pebbles… You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn’t.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

Age merely shows what children we remain.