As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Nature does nothing in vain.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Law is mind without reason.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

That government is best which governs least.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.