The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

I have wondered about time all my life.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Many novice real estate investors soon quit the profession and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of bonds. That’s because, when you invest in real estate, you often see a side of humanity that stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and saving money shelter you from.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

We are all alike, on the inside.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‚If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?‘ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‚If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?‘

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don’t. I feel that it’s quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

Life is wasted on the living.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.