Quotes on Life

Those whose thinking is disciplined by science, like all others, need a basis for the good life, for aspiration, for courage to do great deeds. They need a faith to live by. The hope of the world lies in those who have such faith and who use the methods of science to make their visions become real. Such visions and hope and faith are not a part of science.

Ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Every breath you take, you are getting closer to the grave. But every breath you take, you can also get closer to your liberation.

The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.

People do not want advice - they want corroboration.

Your capacity to keep your vow will depend on the purity of your life.

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

I don't care if someone is new to acting or experienced in acting: you always learn something from them. It's just like people in life - whether they're young or middle-aged or old, you always learn something from someone.

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent and urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things.

One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.

It's said that when we die, the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we're living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world.

A Warrior also knows that the fool who gives advice about someone else's garden is not tending his own plants.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

For mightier far_x000D_ _x000D_ Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway_x000D_ _x000D_ Of magic potent over sun and star,_x000D_ _x000D_ Is love, though oft to agony distrest,_x000D_ _x000D_ And though his favourite be feeble woman's breast.