What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

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

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

To live is to think.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Forever is composed of nows.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

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.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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.