Quotes on Life

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here's the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

My entire life consisted of musings, calculations, practical works, and trials. Many questions remain unanswered; many works are incomplete or unpublished. The most important things still lie ahead.

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.

It is wiser to find out than to suppose.

Only comedians can talk about death, life, God and Virgin Mary. If I was a tragic actor, I couldn't allow myself. But with this accent I can do it. I can talk with death in person because I am a clown. Yes. And I am proud to be a clown - very much.

This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this.

Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

If we each get on a treadmill right now, one of two things is going to happen... either you're going to get off first or I am going to die. Period.

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

To know nothing is the happiest life.