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?

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

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

There is no wealth but life.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Mr. Mijanovi and those associated with him are the hope and the conscience of the Yugoslav revolution.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

At the end of the day, I pray for the best.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

They say miracles are past.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Knowledge is power.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

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

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

‚You are no saint,‘ says the devil. Well, if I am not, I am a sinner, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sink or swim, I go to Him; other hope, I have none.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

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.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

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.

Honor is the reward of virtue.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

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

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

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

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

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

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.