Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

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.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

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

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

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

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay – and rise!

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.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

I used to have nightmares that they would put ‚He played Ted‘ on my tombstone.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

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

While there’s life, there’s hope.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

We have the duty to protect the life of an unborn child.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Theology is unnecessary.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.