We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

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

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

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.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

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

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

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

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

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

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Time stays, we go.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

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.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.