No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

What we live by we die by.

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that’s really the essence of the Christian faith.

Life is anything but predictable.

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

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Philosophy is the highest music.

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.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

Law is mind without reason.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

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

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.