I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is ‚Justice to all. Appeasement to none.‘ This is our secularism.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

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.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

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.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

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

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

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

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

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

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.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

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

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

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

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

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

There’s many a man has more hair than wit.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

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

My affection for Taiwan… is witnessed by everyone. My wife is Taiwanese and I am a son-in-law of Taiwan. I am half Taiwanese.

Science is nothing but perception.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

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

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.