Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

I consider wisdom supernatural because it isn’t taught by men – it’s a gift from God.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

A lie cannot live.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

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

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

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

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

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.