Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‚This is what I asked for.‘

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

Oh, God, I struggle with low self-esteem all the time! I think everyone does. I have so much wrong with me, it’s unbelievable!

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

To live is to think.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Walking is man’s best medicine.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Mickey Rourke’s character in ‚The Wrestler‘ – that was my dad, that was my uncles, that was so many members of my family. It was the only thing they knew. And then they would end up wrestling for a hundred bucks, go to autograph signings for two hundred bucks.

I feel impressed to counsel those engaged in personal challenges to do right. In particular, my heart reaches out to those who feel discouraged by the magnitude of their struggle.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

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

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

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

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

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.

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

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

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.

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.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

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

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.