A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

You’ve got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

All those who believe in psychokinesis – raise my hand.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

Our life is made by the death of others.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

We are never defeated unless we give up on God.

God wants to help us… He loves us… we are His children. But He will not force His help on us at any time. He sees us when we struggle and fight and complain our way through things. And I believe it breaks His heart, when all we have to do is ask Him for help.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

I answer only to God.

God, as Truth, has been for me a treasure beyond price. May He be so to every one of us.

There is nothing so stable as change.

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

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

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

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The lie is a condition of life.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

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

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

In retrospect, I do think it’s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.