Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

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

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

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.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

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.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

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.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

Fear is the mother of morality.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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

I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

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

Faith is easy; I think people complicate it.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

I know I got angels watchin me from the other side.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

One of my major keys is actually the master keys: God.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.

I don’t want to impugn the motives of my colleagues, but my attitude is, speaking just for me, you either believe in border security or you don’t.

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.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

I’m an idealist without illusions.