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

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

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 just have to have a simple faith.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

History should be written as philosophy.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

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

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.