All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

My philosophy is simple: It’s a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

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

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Reality is a sliding door.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

States are not moral agents.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

What we live by we die by.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Nothing can come of nothing.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

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

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

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.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

The truth is lived, not taught.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.