“True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.

The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous.

The market is going to love it. The market always seems to applaud major mergers, even though the vast majority of them don’t work out and don’t increase shareholder value.

You look at [terrorists] faces, they look foreigners, but where are they coming from ? How precise this estimate is difficult to tell, but definitely the majority are Al-Qaeda.

I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed, gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

Since the beginning of the crisis, since the terrorists started to control some areas within Syria, the majority of the Syrian civilians left that areas to join the government areas, not vice versa. If the majority of the Syrians don’t trust the government, they should go the other way.

For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.