So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

I’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

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

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

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

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

You just have to have a simple faith.

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.

Information is not knowledge.

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

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

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

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Ethics and power are separate.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

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.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

He who acts with a constant view to his own advantage will be much murmured against.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.