Man is a universe within himself.

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

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

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

I’m interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

You just have to have a simple faith.

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.

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

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

God does not play dice.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

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

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?