All men are equal before fish.

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

Being is the great explainer.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

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.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

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

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

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

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

All people are born alike – except Republicans and Democrats.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

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

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

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

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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.‘

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.