A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I just don’t have time to get old!

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

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

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

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

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Experience is the teacher of all things.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

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

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.

Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

By indignities men come to dignities.

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

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

I feel matured in a way that I’m happy about. I’m at this other stage in my life – and it’s not a bad thing at all.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.