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

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

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.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

To do nothing is also a good remedy.

I am not the humblest person in the world. I admit that.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

To be is to do.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.