Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

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.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

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

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

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

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

It constitutes a superhuman effort to lead any people in times of crisis. Without them, the changes would be impossible.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

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.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

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.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

No man was ever wise by chance.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Reality is a sliding door.

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.