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

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

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

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

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.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Life is short, the art long.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

My life is a struggle.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

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.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.