The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they’ve had forever. And they’ve been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies, and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

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

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Purity of speech, of the mind, of the senses, and of a compassionate heart are needed by one who desires to rise to the divine platform.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

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.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

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

The law is reason, free from passion.

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

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.