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

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

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

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Every man is his own hell.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.