To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

The unexamined life is not worth living.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

The art is long, life is short.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

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.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

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

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

I don’t see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

There is nothing so stable as change.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

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

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

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

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.