The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

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

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

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.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

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.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

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

All good art is an indiscretion.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

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.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

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.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.