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.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

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.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Duty cannot exist without faith.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don’t adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

I don’t really get nervous that much, or if I do, only I know. It’s all inside me. I am good at hiding everything.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

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

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Religions get lost as people do.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

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?

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.

I answer only to God.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

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

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.