Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

I love being a dad. I just love it.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

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.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

I’ve never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some. But I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Being is the great explainer.

I don’t know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

Truth is what works.

If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work towards getting it.

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

Start wide, expand further, and never look back.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

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

Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks in great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

God does not play dice.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

There’s nothing better than having a baby. I’ve always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed, and it’s true… I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.

If I get married, I want to be very married.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.