To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

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

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

I understand aggressiveness in only one way: being prepared to hurt yourself, not someone else.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

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

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

There is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.

My number one thing? Don’t overleverage yourself. Don’t say you can do something when you really can’t.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

I guess I’m living in the present more than the past.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

The Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

And yet it moves.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Life is warfare.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

I think for my bones and my size, I better stay with my 60 kilo.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.