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.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters – but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

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

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

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

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Plato was a bore.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Evil is whatever distracts.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

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

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

Philosophy is the highest music.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.