It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

I don’t care about money.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Reality is a sliding door.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

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

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

God knows what we are going through when we grieve, and He wants to assure us of His love and concern. He also wants us to turn to Him and bring our heartaches and burdens to Him.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

A jug fills drop by drop.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

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.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

Real living is living for others.

There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that’s rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.