Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

The lie is a condition of life.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

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

There is nothing permanent except change.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The brain is wider than the sky.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Every man is his own hell.

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

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

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.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

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

Plato was a bore.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

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

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

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

Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.