There is nothing permanent except change.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

All men are equal before fish.

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

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

For victory in life, we’ve got to keep focused on the goal, and the goal is Heaven.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

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.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

The good is the beautiful.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

States are not moral agents.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

The lie is a condition of life.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.