The art is long, life is short.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

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

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

A home without books is a body without soul.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

I have always reckoned the dignity of the republic of first importance and preferable to life.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

Music is like film to me.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.