Being is the great explainer.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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

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

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

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

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Reality is a sliding door.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

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.

When you give, it comes back to you.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

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

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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?

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

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.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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.

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

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

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.‘

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

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. When we are born we cry, that we are come to this great state of fools.