The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

God does not play dice.

Things do not change; we change.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

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.

History should be written as philosophy.

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

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Silence is the mother of truth.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

If a person gets his attitude toward money straight, it will help straighten out almost every other area in his life.

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

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.