The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Life is short, the art long.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

What is my life if I am no longer useful to others.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

All that the future holds in store for each sacred child of God will be shaped by his or her parents, family, friends, and teachers. Thus, our faith now becomes part of our posterity’s faith later.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

Folks, you’re the reason that the automobile industry is back. Whether it was the wage freezes, the plant closures, folks, you sacrificed to keep your companies open. Because of your productivity, the combined auto companies have committed to invest another $23 billion in expansion in America.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

Information is not knowledge.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Getting out of bed is like the foundation of the discipline, and I think it carries over into everything else.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I’ll die and it’ll all be finished.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.