Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Law is mind without reason.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

States are not moral agents.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

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

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

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

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

The truth is lived, not taught.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Silence is the mother of truth.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.