In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Sin is geographical.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

Nature abhors annihilation.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

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?

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

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

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.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

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.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.