Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The object of the superior man is truth.

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.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

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

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

God does not play dice.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

History should be written as philosophy.

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

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

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.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

Nothing can come of nothing.

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

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

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.

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

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

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

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

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

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

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

Truth is a pathless land.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

A person hears only what they understand.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.