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.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Number of people have said to me, after hearing your thinking, their mind becomes much more happier.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

How happy had it been for me had I been slain in the battle. It had been far more noble to have died the victim of the enemy than fall a sacrifice to the rage of my friends.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

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?

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.

We live in a bewildering world.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Actor’s life is very long.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

Character is destiny.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

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?

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

The lie is a condition of life.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can’t find.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. 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.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Power means happiness; power means hard work and sacrifice.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.