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

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

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

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

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

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

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

I hate being called an ‚icon.‘ I just don’t like it. That’s all there is to it.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

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

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‚Is this the end of them?‘ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

In fact, my courage and my bravery at a young age was the thing I was bullied for, a kind of ‚Who do you think you are?‘

Truth is a pathless land.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

The world can criticize me, but l can always criticize it back.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

The little man is still a man.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don’t think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you’ve done up to now.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Sometimes a nickname is used instead of the real name. But a nickname may offend either the one named or the parents who gave the name.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.

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

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.