He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

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

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

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

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

All men are equal before fish.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

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

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

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

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.

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.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

Being is the great explainer.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.