For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of 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.

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 in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

And yet it moves.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

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

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

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

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Change alone is unchanging.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

You cannot be a conscious Christian without St. Paul. He translated the teachings of Christ into a doctrinal structure that, even with the additions of a vast number of thinkers, theologians and pastors, has resisted and still exists after two thousand years.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

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

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.

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.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.

Silence is the mother of truth.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.