A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

The good is the beautiful.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

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

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

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

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

Hell is other people.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I am not promising that God will give you everything you want. There are times when we want things that God knows would not be good for us.

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

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

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can’t find.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

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

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

The truest wisdom is a resolute determination.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

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.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.