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

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

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

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

We are going to transform Britain’s rail system from the worst in the world to the best. If you can do a few things like that, when the body gives out, you can say you’ve lived a good life.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

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

God’s mercy and grace give me hope – for myself, and for our world.

There are many levels of Christianity. There are many notions about God. To believe that God is a person is just one of the notions of God that you can find in Christianity. So, we should not say that there is one Christianity. There are many Christianities.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

The march of the human mind is slow.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

In legal language, a covenant generally denotes an agreement between two or more parties. But in a religious context, a covenant is much more significant. It is a sacred promise with God. He fixes the terms.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

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

My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We’re all god.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

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.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.

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.

We welcome the scrutiny of the world – because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Change in all things is sweet.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.