The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.

Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Some kinds of animals burrow in the ground; others do not. Some animals are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others use the hours of daylight. There are tame animals and wild animals. Man and the mule are always tame; the leopard and the wolf are invariably wild, and others, as the elephant, are easily tamed.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war – for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all.

A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.