We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

We live in a bewildering world.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Time stays, we go.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

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.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

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

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Life is our dictionary.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

I swam underwater for 50 meters at a time and walked the length of the pool underwater, with a brick in each hand, all on a single breath.

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

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

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

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Life is a song to me.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

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.

If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

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

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.