To be is to do.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

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.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

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.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

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

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

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

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Truth is what works.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.