The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

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

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

History should be written as philosophy.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

Luckily for me, people don’t scream at me that much in my everyday life.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

I don’t know how to work a room. It’s a real skill.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.

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