The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Our best thoughts come from others.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

When you have enough understanding and compassion in you, then that amount of understanding and compassion will try to express itself in action. And your practice should help you to cultivate more understanding and compassion.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

I don’t have a problem with Hulk Hogan. People say things and do things, and who am I to judge?

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

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

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

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.

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

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

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

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

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

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

No man was ever wise by chance.