There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

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

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

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

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

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

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

We moralize among ruins.

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

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

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

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.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

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

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

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

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

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

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

What goes up must come down.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

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.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

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.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

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

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.