If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Law is mind without reason.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

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

Man – a being in search of meaning.

It is natural to die as to be born.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We all have done something unethical.

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

It’s that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so ‚don’t fuss, dear; get on with it.‘

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

And every human being is precious.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

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.

Every man is his own hell.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.