We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

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

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

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

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

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

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

And yet it moves.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

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

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Theology is unnecessary.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

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

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

The art is long, life is short.

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.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

God does not play dice.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

There is no wealth but life.

Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.