Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

The good is the beautiful.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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

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

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Nature does nothing in vain.

I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.