Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Being is the great explainer.

Man is a universe within himself.

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.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

Our inquiring friends and neighbors not of our faith can also catch the wave. We encourage them to keep all that is good and true in their lives. And we invite them to receive more, especially the glorious truth that through God’s eternal plan, families can be together forever.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

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?

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

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

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

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.