There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

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.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

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

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

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.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

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

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

In the ’70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

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

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

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.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

The lie is a condition of life.

To live is to think.

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

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.