You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

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.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

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

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 a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

I’m tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro – that’s the Scotch-Irish part.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

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.

And yet it moves.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

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

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

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

A lot of people have said I’d have probably done better in my career if I hadn’t looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn’t be blamed because you want to look pretty.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

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

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

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

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.

It is natural to die as to be born.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

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?

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

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

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

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Religions get lost as people do.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.