What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

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

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

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

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.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

No sane man will dance.

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

Our life is made by the death of others.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

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

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.