A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

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

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Life is wasted on the living.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Sin is geographical.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

When you give, it comes back to you.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

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

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

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

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

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

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.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

You just have to have a simple faith.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

The good is the beautiful.

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

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.