Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

In my experience, many people confuse being cowardly with being nice.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing: we must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

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?

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

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.

Life is grim, and we don’t have to be grim all the time.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

Seeing is not always believing.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

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

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.