Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

Revolutions go not backward.

Seeing is not always believing.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is all I need from life.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

There are some loony people in this world!

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

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.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Passions are the gales of life.

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

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.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

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.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.