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

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

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

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

If you would judge, understand.

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

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

A friend is nothing but a known enemy.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.