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

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

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

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

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

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

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.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

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

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

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

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.