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.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

And every human being is precious.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Something must be done to save humanity! A better world is possible!

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‚superlive,‘ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

For revolutionary Cubans, to cooperate with other poor and exploited peoples has always been a political principle and a duty towards humanity.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

I’m constantly thinking.

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.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

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.‘

We all have special numbers in our lives, and 4 is that for me. It’s the day I was born. My mother’s birthday, and a lot of my friends‘ birthdays, are on the fourth; April 4 is my wedding date.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

The United States fully accepts the profound truth that our own progress, prosperity, and peace are interlocked with the progress, prosperity, and peace of all humanity.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

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

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.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

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

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

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

Life is wasted on the living.

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.