It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Man is a universe within himself.

I’m always afraid of failing. I have to quiet that fear if I’m going to get up in the morning.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.

The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

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

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,‘ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. ‚Shake it off. Stop complainin‘. Stop grumblin‘. Stop cryin‘. We are going to press on. We have work to do.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.

A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

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

You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.

Find people who will make you better.

Be a player; don’t play yourself. And don’t play basketball. That’s not your sport, Jeb Bush.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Change alone is unchanging.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.

Just remember, you can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.

My constant prayer, my number one foreign goal, is to bring peace to Israel. And in the process to Israel’s neighbours.