No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

Every loss of life is terrible.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

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

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

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’m really looking forward to seeing what life brings to me.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

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.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

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

My life is a struggle.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

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

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

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

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.

Conscience is a man’s compass.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just demand more of life than what is happening in the moment. Sometimes this is a great mistake, as it’s always a good deal different than you expect it.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

The art is long, life is short.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The Scoutmaster who is a hero to his boys holds a powerful lever to their development but at the same time brings a great responsibility on himself. They are quick enough to see the smallest characteristic about him, whether it be a virtue or a vice.