To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

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

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

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.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

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 know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

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

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I think and that is all that I am.

To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

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.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

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.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

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

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

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

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?