“Respect what is human in everyone, seek it out and create it...The true citizen of the future is he who is free from prejudice and convention, who does not fear for himself and does not fear the misunderstanding of others, who places above all else in life the marvellous emotion of love and the happiness of untrammelled creativity. That is the humanity for which I died.”

“The truth is that life is hard and dangerous; that he who seeks his own happiness does not find it; that he who is weak must suffer; that he who demands love will be disappointed; that he who is greedy will not be fed; that he who seeks peace will find strife; that truth is only for the brave; that joy is only for him who does not fear to be alone; that life is only for the one who is not afraid to die.”

“I looked and looked but I didn't see God.[Speaking about, in 1961, becoming the first human to enter space.]”

“Human life is insignificant. What’s ominous is the movement of the spheres. When I settled here, a sun speck sat on the doorjamb at two in the afternoon. Thirty-six days passed. The speck jumped to the next room. The earth had completed another leg of its journey. The little sun speck, a child’s plaything, reminds us of eternity.”

“Once he raised his arm to show his friends the back of his hand, where the veins were laid out in the shape of a tree, and he broke out in the following improvisation:“Here,” he said, “is the tree of life. Here is a tree that tells me more about life and death than the flowering and fading of tree gardens. I don’t remember when exactly I discovered that my wrist was blooming like a tree…but it must have been during that wonderful time when the flowering and fading of trees still spoke to me not of life and death but of the end and beginning of the school year! It was blue then, this tree, blue and slender, and the blood, which at the time I thought of not as a liquid but as light, rose like the dawn over it and turned my metacarpus’s entire landscape into a Japanese watercolor…“The years passed, I changed, and the tree changed, too.“I remember a splendid time; the tree was spreading. The pride I felt, seeing its inexorable flowering! It became gnarled and reddish brown—and therein lay its strength! I could call it my hand’s might rigging. But now, my friends! How decrepit it is, how rotten!“The branches seem to be breaking off, cavities have appeared…It’s sclerosis, my friends! And the fact that the skin is getting glassy, and the tissue beneath it is squishy—isn’t this a fog settling on the tree of my life, the fog that will soon envelop all of me?”

“It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.”

“There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”