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

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

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.

Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.

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

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

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

Start wide, expand further, and never look back.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

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

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

God does not play dice.

If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Our life is made by the death of others.

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

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Start with God – the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

By indignities men come to dignities.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

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.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

God’s desire is that we excel.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.