When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them. That’s the whole point.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

We think it’s fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That’s not our goal for Brad and me at all. I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

Who’s my hero? That’s a great question… Well, I think my dad is my hero, because he’s someone I look up to every day.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

In our home there was always prayer – aloud, proud and unapologetic.

I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

First and foremost, we need to be the adults we want our children to be. We should watch our own gossiping and anger. We should model the kindness we want to see.

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.

My father used to wear the same pants for like a week.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‚Trey‘ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

The only time my records are going to be broken is by my own spawn. I’m going be training that child out the womb.

Life well spent is long.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

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

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

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

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.