Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

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.

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

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

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

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?

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

A useless life is an early death.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

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

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.

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.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

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.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

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.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.

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.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Lord keep us all from sin. Teach us how to walk circumspectly; enable us to guard our minds against error of doctrine, our hearts against wrong feelings, and our lives against evil actions.

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.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

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