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

Reality is a sliding door.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

They are resilient children, but they are children, and as much as they need help to understand the hard truths in life, they also need what we all need – protection and love.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

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

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

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

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

Fear is the mother of morality.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.