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.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

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

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

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

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Life is warfare.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Life isn’t fair, but God is.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

What’s done can’t be undone.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

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.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

The way to know life is to love many things.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

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.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

Without gambling, I would not exist.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

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

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

Sin is geographical.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

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.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.