All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

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

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us thru that darkness to a safe and sane future.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

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

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

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.

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

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

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

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair, there is no hope.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don’t think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest.

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

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

He who has felt his own ruin will not imagine the case of any to be hopeless; nor will he think them too fallen to be worthy his regard.

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.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare – something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state – something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

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

‚Hope and change‘ has become a cliche in our nation, and it is daunting to think that any American could hope for change from what God has blessed.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.