To live outside the law, you must be honest.

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Silence is the mother of truth.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

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

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

What we live by we die by.

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

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

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

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Our life is made by the death of others.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

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

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.

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

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

A letter does not blush.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.