The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

To be is to do.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

I mean, families are weird.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Some sarcasm is best told simply.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‚Is it safe?‘ Expediency asks the question, ‚Is it politic?‘ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‚Is it popular?‘ But Conscience asks the question, ‚Is it right?‘

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.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

‚Educational‘ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.