Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

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

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

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

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

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.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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.