Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

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

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

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

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

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.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

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

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Not always actions show the man; we find who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

What you guys want, I’m for.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

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

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.