The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you’re making a mistake but let you go on with it, that’s when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a ‚should‘ involved, and this cannot be worked out from, ‚If I do this, what will happen?‘ alone.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

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.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The risk for me would be in not taking one – that’s the only thing that’s really risky for me.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

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.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

Words are loaded pistols.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Quitting is the easiest thing to do.

When I’m in management meetings when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me. I’m the one who has to go out and fulfill all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s the part of my life where I feel most in control.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

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

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

If I don’t run for president, we’ll all be OK.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

Of two evils, choose neither.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?