Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Plato was a bore.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

When you give, it comes back to you.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

There is nothing happens to any person but what was in his power to go through with.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.