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

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

He does not possess wealth; it possesses him.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

Seeing myself on the screen makes me cringe. I understand that I am that way – pouty.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

Being is the great explainer.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Every man is his own hell.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

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

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

I spend a lot of time balancing between faith and disbelief.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.