For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

All men are equal before fish.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

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.

People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it’s so important to me. It’s hard to hear that people think I’m not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I’m nuts.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

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

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

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

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.