Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

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

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

When you give, it comes back to you.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

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

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

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

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

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

What was God doing before the divine creation?

It has been discovered that all the world is made of the same atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from?

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Time stays, we go.

Nature hates calculators.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

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

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.