The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: ‚If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?‘

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

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

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Solitude is independence.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Life is a dead-end street.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

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

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

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

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.