What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

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

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

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

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?

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

The heart is great which shows moderation in the midst of prosperity.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

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

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Life is wasted on the living.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

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.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

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

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.