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.

Philosophy is the highest music.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

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

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

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

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

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

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

I repeat… that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

I don’t ever make moves under pressure.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

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.

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.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

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?

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

God does not play dice.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

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?

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

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

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

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.