In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

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

Knowledge is true opinion.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

You just have to have a simple faith.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

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.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Youth is wasted on the young.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

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

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

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.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.