Such as we are made of, such we be.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

I don’t really read a lot of newspapers. I don’t pay attention to what is being said or written about me. I’ve had lots of experiences in the past when I got too much into it. That sort of diverts your focus.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

Be content to seem what you really are.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.

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

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.