You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

When I was running training, we would fire a couple of leaders from every SEAL team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability – it was a question of their ability to listen.

Children make your life important.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

To see the right and not to do it is cowardice.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

My life is my message.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

There is nothing permanent except change.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

It’s not easy being young. It’s hard to know what to do.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

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

Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

Loving others always costs us something and requires effort. And you have to decide to do it on purpose. You can’t wait for a feeling to motivate you.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.