Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

Hell is other people.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

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

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

Children make your life important.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy’s ranks.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

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

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.