Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

States are not moral agents.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

And yet it moves.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

If you can build a business up big enough, it’s respectable.

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

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Every man is his own hell.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

It feels good to have your work respected again.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

By indignities men come to dignities.

I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Philosophy is the highest music.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

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.

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.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Like it or not, there are a lot of dance teachers in this country who respect me, whether they personally like me or not.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.