The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

I don’t expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

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

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

War is the province of danger.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

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

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

The honor of a nation is its life.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

Life is wasted on the living.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Freedom is relative.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.