We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

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.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

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.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

I’m not in favour of dividing Hindus and Sikhs. I’m not in favour of dividing Hindus and Christians. All the citizens, all the voters, are my countrymen.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.