It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

Freedom is not just declared it is exercised.

If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure

The poorer we are inwardly, the more we try to enrich ourselves outwardly.

I realized that I was really tired of people popping on and off of my property like it was a train station on the supernatural railroad.

Whenever you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did, the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

...I dabble in causes and effects.

We must at times search our own souls and discover what we really are. Our real character, much as we would wish, cannot be hidden.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

I am in love with cars; I love anything that moves.