All men by nature desire knowledge.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

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

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

We’re one of the only animals in the world that don’t really think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals, and we must respect our fellow animals.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

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

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

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.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Theology is unnecessary.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

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 in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

The less you know, the more you believe.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

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

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

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Nature has always had more force than education.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Men want to make women happy.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

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

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.