You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

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.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Be as you wish to seem.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

When you’re in hell, you forget how great you really are because you’re suffering and you forget the great things you’ve done.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

Science is nothing but perception.

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

I believe nothing happens by mistake. You know, the universe has a divine plan. That sounds dramatic.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.