Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

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.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

All men are equal before fish.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

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.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

That government is best which governs least.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Sometimes, people can be extraordinarily judgmental and closed-minded to anyone different or special, which is why it’s so hard for young people in this day and age to be comfortable enough in their own skin to not listen to the people picking on them.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.