It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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

In England, when an athlete gets to the top, we do our best to destroy him.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

I allow myself to fail. I allow myself to break. I’m not afraid of my flaws.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

No rapper in the world from Jay-Z to Tupac to Biggie has 100 percent love on everything they do.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Law is mind without reason.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.