Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

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

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

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.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

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.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

A jug fills drop by drop.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

The art is long, life is short.

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.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

To our brothers in Latin America and the world, we must convey that the Cuban people will overcome.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

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.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event.

The future will be better tomorrow.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

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.

Everywhere I go I find that people… both leaders and individuals… are asking one basic question, ‚Is there any hope for the future?‘ My answer is the same, ‚Yes, through Jesus Christ.‘

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?