“There is no more desire to live past one’s time than to die before it.”

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.

You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future – a good future, a useful future – and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about.

The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it’s bad for you.

There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Sometimes even in pain we smile to the world until we think we’re dying.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

The broken worlds we hide inside; that’s how we start to die!

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.

Most days missing her is my only choice between death and dying.

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, ’tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, with courage to endure.