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.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument… an instrument of power. An instrument that establishes the agenda.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

Power is like being a lady… if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

If you want special results, you have to feel special things and do special things together. You can speak about spirit, or you can live it.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

It is hard to contend against one’s heart’s desire; for whatever it wishes to have it buys at the cost of soul.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

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

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

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

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.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

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

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

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

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

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.

I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It’s enough. Because it’s important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.