Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

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

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

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

I’m interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

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

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Don’t be misled by those who claim God doesn’t exist, because He does.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Life is warfare.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

He is dead in this world who has no belief in another.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

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

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

I don’t think you should spend your life praying for things, but I do believe you should thank God for what He’s given you… but I think the scripture teaches us that we can pray for our dreams, pray for the big things… he’s not a small God; this God is incredible.

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.