In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

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

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

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.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

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.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

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

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Reality is a sliding door.

Real living is living for others.

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

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

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

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

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.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

All men by nature desire knowledge.