To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

There is no wealth but life.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

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

Man is a universe within himself.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

I’m not saying that love always takes you to heaven. Your life can become a nightmare. But that said, it is worth taking the risk.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

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

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Oh, my mama was awesome. Very strict, overreligious, loved the Lord, loved rules. But she had to be that way because of where we were growing up, the neighborhood I was from.

Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action, which produces further confusion, further misery.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

An unused life is an early death.

We moralize among ruins.

Evil is whatever distracts.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

My father wasn’t a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher – one of those Victorians, hard as iron – but my dad was tough enough.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.