It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Life is wasted on the living.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

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

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

What we live by we die by.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It’s enough. I’m enough. My kids are enough.

You can tell the strength of a nation by the women behind its men.

Wealthy men can’t live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

By indignities men come to dignities.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.