Life is wasted on the living.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

What’s done can’t be undone.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

I suppose that’s one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

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.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

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

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

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

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

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.

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