What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we love, or that we will not be safe. Often, our biggest fear is the knowledge that one day our bodies will cease functioning. So even when we are surrounded by all the conditions for happiness, our joy is not complete.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Tell your wife often how terrific she looks.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

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

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

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

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

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

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Men’s vows are women’s traitors!

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

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.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

I know love is the answer.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.