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.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

A useless life is an early death.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

There is nothing so stable as change.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Everybody asks if putting is like shooting free throws. It has a very similar kind of mindset. And it’s just you, the ball, and the target.

Words are loaded pistols.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

I don’t worry about stress. I create it.

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

It’s one thing to be religious, but it’s another thing to make religion your policy.

Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

Life is wasted on the living.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

History should be written as philosophy.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

Happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

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

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

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?

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

Virtually nothing is impossible in this world if you just put your mind to it and maintain a positive attitude.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.