Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

Bottom line: God will not allow any person to keep you from your destiny. They may be bigger, stronger, or more powerful, but God knows how to shift things around and get you to where you’re supposed to be.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Being no bigot myself to any mode of worship, I am disposed to endulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct plainest easiest and least liable to exception.

A letter does not blush.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

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.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.