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

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

You just have to have a simple faith.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

Character is destiny.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

Silence is the mother of truth.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

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

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

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

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

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

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

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 more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

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.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.