If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

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.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

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.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

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

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

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

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

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.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

By indignities men come to dignities.

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

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

We moralize among ruins.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

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

Real living is living for others.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.