Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

If I don’t run for president, we’ll all be OK.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

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.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

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

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

As is the case with most people in this game, I am driven by financial motives and creative motives; the question I had to answer is which motive I will give priority to?

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

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

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Life is warfare.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, ‚If you don’t know how to make the right decision, you’re not a director.‘

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.