We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

When your mother asks, ‚Do you want a piece of advice?‘ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

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?

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

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

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Before I lost my voice, it was slurred, so only those close to me could understand, but with the computer voice, I found I could give popular lectures. I enjoy communicating science. It is important that the public understands basic science, if they are not to leave vital decisions to others.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

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

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Words are loaded pistols.

All men hate the nagging.

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

The brain is wider than the sky.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Character is destiny.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Change alone is unchanging.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.