I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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

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.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

I kinda live where I find myself.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

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

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

There is nothing permanent except change.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

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

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

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.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

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.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

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.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

There is no wealth but life.

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 a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.