There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

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

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

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

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Theology is unnecessary.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

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

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

No man was ever wise by chance.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

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.

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

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

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

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

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.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

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

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

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

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.