Law is mind without reason.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

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

A jug fills drop by drop.

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

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

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

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

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.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Law, without force, is impotent.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Religions get lost as people do.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

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 call him free who is led solely by reason.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Nature does nothing in vain.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

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

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