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

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

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

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.

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

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

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

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

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

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

God does not play dice.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Nature is not human hearted.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

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

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

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.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.