All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

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

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

God does not play dice.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

There is nothing so stable as change.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

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.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

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.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Without failure there is no achievement.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

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

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Every man is his own hell.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.

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

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

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.

There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

When you give, it comes back to you.