One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‚superlive,‘ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

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

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

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

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

Character is destiny.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

My old drama coach used to say, ‚Don’t just do something, stand there.‘ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren’t able to live in the place you called home.

Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

I’m not going to stop having problems.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Respect is one of life’s greatest treasures. I mean, what does it all add up to if you don’t have that?

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

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