Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph, not merely in the end but in every moment.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime— The image of eternity.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Grace under pressure.

The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.

Man, if you gotta ask, you’re never going to know

When Alexander of Macedon was thirty-three, he cried salt tears that there were no more worlds to conquer… [Eric] Bristow is only twenty-seven!

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost.

Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Art is only Nature operating with the aid of the instruments she has made.

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practitioners, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.

I am just a poor boy.
Though my story’s seldom told,
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles,
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilisation of the Fabians.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse…it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place.

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

When I don’t have red, I use blue.

All my possessions for a moment of time.

We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves we have no great ones.

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterises prayer, too, and the eye of the storm…an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Trained discriminations are not a constantly reliable guide to behaviour. Culturally motivated preferences based on those distinctions are, on the whole, unreliable. And they control us in insidious, unnatural ways.

This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time.

The more you know the harder you will find it to make up your mind.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilisation it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

A good End cannot sanctify evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; but now I know it.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

The swallow has set her six young on the rail, And looks sea-ward.

Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.

Beauty is the lover’s gift.

Our great weariness comes from work not done.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The burden of the incommunicable.

Had laws not been, we never had been blamed;
For not to know we sinned is innocence.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way.

Science does not yield any fixed picture of things, but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview. From the standpoint of anyone who values freedom of thought, this may be unfortunate, but it is undoubtedly the chief source of sciences appeal. For us, science is a refuge from uncertainty, promising – and in some measure delivering – the miracle of freedom from thought; while churches have become sanctuaries for doubt.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn ’til dusk.

Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

All for one, one for all.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.

The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult.

History a distillation of rumour.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

…the report of my death was an exaggeration.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.

If there is some end in the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the chief good.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognise his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face.

Humans are good at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

Very few people were true Nazis, but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings.

Morality tells us that conscience may not be heard – but that it speaks always against cruelty and injustice. In fact conscience blesses cruelty and injustice – so long as their victims can be quietly buried.

If we are replaced by machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Only rich people put their snot back in their pocket.

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough,
You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

A little magic can take you a long way.

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

You got your passion, you got your pride,
But don’t you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true,
When will you realise… Vienna waits for you?

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favouritism, mostly—endemic to the system.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it’s just the opposite

How small and selfish sorrow is. But it bangs one about until one is senseless.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

Mother died today. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I don’t know.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called Ego.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature sures the disease.

Never less idle than when wholly idle, nor less alone than when wholly alone.

Often, no sooner would the mind begin to scale the heights of Mt. Knowledge than it would receive a frantic call from body base camp, demanding it return to oversee “Operation Masturbate.”

Beware the fury of a patient man.

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That’s where we live. That’s home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Fight like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the “ability” to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.

The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

Those have most power to hurt us that we love.

The brevity of our life, the dullness of our senses, the torpor of our indifference, the futility of our occupation, suffer us to know but little: and that little is soon shaken and then torn from the mind by that traitor to learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory, oblivion.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Mr Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.

Reason is the life of the law, nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason…The law, which is the perfection of reason.

Are all men in disguise except those crying?

I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalised, I hope to see this ratio as one of the parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realise that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.

Hiroshima is not merely a witness of history. Hiroshima is an endless warning for the future of humankind. If Hiroshima is ever forgotten, it is evident that the mistake will be repeated and bring human history to an end.

When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Theories about the nature of the world become frameworks within which we live. And so they constrain what we think is possible, what we think is real.

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilisations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

I’m going to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.

Is not the pleasure of feeling and exhibiting power over other beings, a principal part of the gratification of cruelty?

Grief is a species of idleness.

Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.

There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.

The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach, but Reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

To the man who is afraid everything rustles.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

If I could explain it to the average person, It wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize. 

We are all special cases. We all want to appeal to something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.

I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

Ocean, n.
A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?

The broad mass of a nation…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? “Natural” death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.

We quickly fall into the trap of turning names into things, so that these names identify some more real “I-know-not-what” that stands independent of the now “superficial” way which we actually experience any particular event.

The pursuit of knowledge, is a worthy objective in its own right and needs no external validation.

Nagasaki has to be forever the last city in the world bombed by nuclear weapons!

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

And we forget because we must, and not because we will.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

The horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Liberty’s in every blow! Let us do—or die!!!

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

After an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture — I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favour, without presenting any solution of these, and for this reason I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and moves: Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfil and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands. I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed. That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.

Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up on the cement wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.

A stitch in time would have confused Einstein.

What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country!

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanising myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

Oblivion is a kind of Annihilation.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

Oh no, it wasn’t the aeroplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.

We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

The way to be rid of such personal concerns is to be rid of the distinction between one’s person and the world in which we live.

Tell me if anything was ever done.

We sleep peacefully in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Because the road is rough and long, Shall we despise the skylark’s song?

The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Don’t believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I don’t think it makes sense to give more importance to a mountain than an ant.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.

Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.

It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

Don’t hit at all if it is honourably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft!

The only possible death is to lose one’s belief in the prospects for human progress.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim’s heart, he will know no other smile but hers.

No mask like open truth to cover lies, As to go naked is the best disguise.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, the meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.

Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather.

There’s a sucker born every minute.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.

The secret of being boring is to say everything.

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

You were absent for all of human history before your birth. The idea that you simply can’t imagine not existing after death is really just for lack of trying I think.

I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

A minority may be right, and the majority is always in the wrong.

A long line of cases shows that it is not merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

The point is that, whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, practice this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves.

‘There are all kinds of courage,’ said Dumbledore, smiling. ‘It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.’

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.

It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

You can’t believe in something you don’t.

Shoot first and inquire afterwards, and if you make mistakes, I will protect you.

They are neither finite quantities, or quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?

I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.

Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shrieked—as Kosciusko fell!

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.

It is the star-spangled banner; Oh long may it wave
Over the land of the free, and the home of the brave!

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

We are star stuff pondering the stars.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

All things are borne of nothing and are borne onwards to infinity.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, “The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.

Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilisation I expected them to serve.

If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.

Lots of little victories take on the pain.

Let all your thinks be thanks.

I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more: If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?

If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

Variety is the soul of pleasure.

Always be a little kinder than necessary.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will last forever.

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colours, that colour is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

A nation … is just a society for hating foreigners.

Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His.

What millions died—that Caesar might be great!

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you to recognise a mistake when you make it again.

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

The deed is all, and not the glory.

Stare at the Pale Blue Dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything.

If ignorance of nature gave rise to the Gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.

Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.

I can sympathise with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

All colours will agree in the dark.

The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

Rome has spoken; the case is concluded.

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.

Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.

I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged and hoofed flocks and herds that darken the air and populate the plains and forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?

Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.

And love’s the noblest frailty of the mind.

Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment chop wood, carry water.

Like being savaged by a dead sheep.

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

They that die by famine die by inches.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

Where is everybody?

Science is a way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

The trouble with an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.

But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

The cure of a romantic first flame is a better surety to subsequent discretion, than all the exhortations of all the fathers, and mothers, and guardians, and maiden aunts in the universe.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

The map is not the territory.

The most important things are unknown or unknowable.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Self-confidence is very important. If you don’t think you can win, you will take cowardly decisions in the crucial moments, out of sheer respect for your opponent. You see the opportunity but also greater limitations than you should. I have always believed in what I do on the chessboard, even when I had no objective reason to. It is better to overestimate your prospects than underestimate them.

When you can’t have what you want, it’s time to start wanting what you have.

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images which are all-pervading and each complete, each conveying the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.

In the torments of the intellect,… skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

If there is no struggle there is no progress.

To love what you do and feel that it matters – how could anything be more fun?

This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

He [God] will not leave his promises unfulfilled, nor his threats unexecuted…Neither can he want power to execute his purposes; he who spoke, and the world was made, can speak again, and it will perish.

Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.

Every time a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

One cool judgement is worth a dozen hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It’s just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.

It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one’s youth.

Poverty is spiritual halitosis.

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers … What they really hate are lousy programmers.

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilisation.

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness – an act of trust in the unknown.

I refute it thus.

I don’t think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? […] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they’re going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.

Suppose your father… walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

How often are we forced to charge fortune with partiality towards the unjust!

Nothing: a mechanical chaos of causal, brute enmity, on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Death destroys a man: the idea of death saves him.

The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

Let no one enter who does not know geometry [mathematics].

I was born into a world of just under two billion people today there are nearly seven billion of us. Whenever I hear those numbers I can honestly say I find it incredible, triple the number of human beings in what seems like the blink of an eye and the world transformed utterly. Human population density is a factor in every environmental problem I have ever encountered, from urban sprawl to urban overcrowding; disappearing tropical forests to ugly sinks of plastic waste, and now the relentless increase of atmospheric pollution. I’ve spent much of the last 50 years seeking wilderness filming animals in their natural habitat and, to some extent, avoiding humans. But, over the years, true wilderness has become harder to find.

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?

What I’m saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job.

If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

God is a lie, we made him up for money!

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but which I have no evidence.

Unmoved though witlings sneer and rivals rail; Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail.

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.

The male libido is like being chained to a madman.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, above all, to make you see.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.

The more one is aware of political bias the more one can be independent of it, and the more one claims to be impartial the more one is biased.

Ideas beget their opposites and are then subsumed by them.

A circle has no beginning.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

Applause, n.
The echo of a platitude.

If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking for women’s names.

An economist is a man who, when he finds something works in practice, wonders if it works in theory.

One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Note this, you proud men of action. You are nothing but the unconscious hodmen of the men of ideas…Maximilien Robespierre was nothing but the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.

One picture is worth ten thousand words.

Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spiders web.

Pure mathematics… seems to me a rock on which all idealism founders: 317 is a prime, not because we think it is, or because our minds are shaped one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off.

My dear young fellow,’ the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, ‘there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.’

People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Our planet may be home to 30 million different kinds of animals and plants. Each individual locked in its own life-long fight for survival. Everywhere you look, on land or in the ocean, there are extraordinary examples of the lengths living things go to stay alive.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, “I should like to hear some music,” mean what they appear to mean, or merely, “At this moment I should like to forget myself.” When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true.

Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

Immensely powerful though we are today, it’s equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what’s more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. […] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.

All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.

In all matters of opinion and science…the difference between men is…oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance. An explanation of the terms commonly ends the controversy, and the disputants are surprised to find that they had been quarrelling, while at bottom they agreed in their judgement.

He who conquers others is strong; he who conquers himself is mighty.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.

No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.

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

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats, ,br>Wakeful they lie.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote in past achievement.

Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of scepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realise how complicated life is.

With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite

Brevity is the soul of wit.

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into a sun.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.

Always be shorter than anybody dared to hope.

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow.

Philosophy is what you do when you don’t yet know what the right questions are to ask.

Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

There are no atheists in the foxholes.

War settles nothing…to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one!

But I’ll tell you what hermits realise. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light; She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.

What Cato did, and Addison approved Cannot be wrong.

The brain is wider than the sky.
For put them side by side,
the one the other will contain,
with ease – and you beside.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

The equation is smarter than I am.

Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. And time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

If you look at it historically, you see that what the religious tend to fear in drug use is a rival sense of transcendence.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

If your dreams don’t scare you they aren’t big enough.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

In order to uphold its own central tenet that humans are not at the centre of anything, the scientific method itself must be universal. It must have been discovered elsewhere by intelligences across the universe. Science needs aliens. The more aliens the better. That no aliens have so far stepped forward might be seen as a blow to materialism.

The only reason we die, is because we accept death as an inevitability.

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

Philosophers have been profoundly wrong on almost every question under the sun over the last 2000 years. You should never listen to the answer of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions.

That action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

The total depravity of inanimate things.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivised consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviours are acceptable.

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

I had jumped.’ He checked himself, averted his gaze… ‘It seems,’ he added.

A new maxim is often a brilliant error.

The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

…
And don’t spend your time lookin’ around
For something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin’ about it
I’ll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you

Often, people work long hard hours at jobs they hate to earn money to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like.

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the eons of time – a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multi-coloured drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy, which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence, “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

There is a pleasure sure, In being mad, which none but madmen know!

The truth can wait, for it lives a long time.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

You mustn’t always believe what I say… Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

Language is fossil poetry.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don’t even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognise you in the surging wave of the next moment.

Specialisation is for insects.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table….

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

I quote others only in order to better express myself.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

He thought about himself, and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful, and of the stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars, How many miles the moon might have in girth, Of air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

If you’re an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you’re going to get. It’s a precious life. It’s a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you’re religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don’t live this life to the full because you think you’re going to get another one. That’s an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully

A monologue is not a decision.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

The depositary of power is always unpopular.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Darwin made a great inversion of reasoning when he realised that you can have a bottom-up theory of creativity: that all the wonderful design that we see in the biosphere could be the products, direct and indirect, of a mindless, purposeless process.

Do or do not… there is no try.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Perfection is the child of Time.

In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time. Although the creation of a universe might seem very unlikely, I’ll emphasise that no one has counted the failed attempts.

The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws. Laws that can be understood by the human mind. I believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives — but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions — which is a philosophical activity — is morally as well as intellectually important.

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

We make war that we may live in peace.

I hate to lose more than I love to win.

It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood…Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

God will pardon me. It is His trade.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is – absurd.

What is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

If youth knew; if age could.

As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes,
Brother to Death.

We must touch his weaknesses with a delicate hand. There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence, that we can scarce weed out the fault without eradicating the virtue.

Not all those who wander are lost

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Equations are the devil’s sentences.

Being against evil doesn’t make you good.

How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

Know thyself.

Indeed, it’s always a paltry, feeble, tiny mind that takes pleasure in revenge.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

Humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

There never was a war that was not inward;
I must fight till I conquered in myself what causes war.

When you’ve spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment… it’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

It will be a great day in science if we sometime discover a damp shadow in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know of the reality that contains us.

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

What I claim is, all the varieties of free will that are worth wanting we can have in a deterministic world.

Work will make you free.

If you still have to ask…shame on you.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.

I owe a duty, where I cannot love.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy, sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.

The dream of reason produces monsters.

The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

In the outer reaches of the universe, as far away from here as it is possible to be, beyond time and space and matter, nothing was happening. And the nothing was without form, pure potential for becoming, an evanescent yet heaving sea of energy coming into and out of existence. For reasons not yet understood, a bubble of energy that should have bust back into non-existence breaks free with the rage of Achilles from the conditions of the quantum world and sweeps out a universe.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand, that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment, is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place.

The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilisation, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.

We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical information, in man’s inner growth, then it’s not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.

In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.

Possessions are generally diminished by possession.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I could not learn something from him.

You don’t like it? Go somewhere else. To another universe, where the rules are simpler; philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy.

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

We choose to go to the Moon! … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win…

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being wilfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.

Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them – to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it’s no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over – fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilise antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

They who drink beer will think beer.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place – and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all – so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

When times are bad I take great comfort from the feeling that Paddington wouldn’t be fazed by the situation.

Mathematics is the only religion that has proved itself a religion.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.

To say that consciousness may only seem to exist, from the inside, is to admit its existence in full, for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

Stolen sweets are best.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.

Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen.

So many books, so little time.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

The half is greater than the whole.

For a man’s house is his castle, and each man’s home is his safest refuge.

For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognisable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvellously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvellous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.

It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.

I am so afraid of people’s words. They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That’s how you kill.

Time wounds all heals.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the need of the moment.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

The Creator, if he exists, has a special preference for beetles.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

The odious smell of truth.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Through many a dark hour, I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot, had God on his side.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

People once blamed or thanked God for everything that happened beyond their control. Now we blame or thank Government instead

I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

No man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

Most things still remain to be done. A glorious future!

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second.

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

I don’t want to believe. I want to know.

What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.

I began to realise how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Only those who have known discrimination truly know its evil.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organised complexity. 

We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Future, n.
That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

The hard problem of consciousness.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet. – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service , the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause. Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social becomes more difficult – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.

I’d far rather be happy than right any day.

War always finds a way.

Wear your learning, like your watch in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it, merely to show that you have one.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Come away; poverty’s catching.

Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one.

Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realisation that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.

Today we’re living in an era in which the biggest threat to other species and to the Earth as we know it might well be ourselves. The issue of population size was controversial because it touches on the most personal decisions we make, but we ignore it at our peril.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

Suspect him the most that trusts the least.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

As you know, God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small.

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.

A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilisation. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.

Brains are for generating expectations about the future.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

I think, therefore I am.

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

If a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat and another holding the sieve underneath.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

Worrying is a misuse of imagination.

My object all sublime I shall achieve in time— To let the punishment fit the crime— The punishment fit the crime.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery – the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets – is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

Anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you.

Where Christ erecteth his Church, the devil in the same churchyard will have his chapel.

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

The Answer to the Great Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is… Forty-two

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity.

The cynics are correct the sense of free will is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh.

The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

It requires a certain stubbornness not to see, in the fine measurements that science makes, confirmation of the existence of an external reality.

Those of us who live moral lives, lives we’re not ashamed of, in fact rely a great deal more on the support of our friends than we readily acknowledge.

Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc. to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

The sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn’t a word that wasn’t essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning… The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
“After all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.’

Quick ask a teenager while they still know it all.

There is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical. Out of this stuff comes minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

The devil dances in empty pockets.

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it

A genuine understanding of how mental states arise from the structure and function of the brain would be the scientific achievement before which all past achievements would pale.

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.

I do not believe an artist’s life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

The centre that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.