All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

God does not play dice.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

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?

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

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.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

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

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

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.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

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.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

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

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. 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 blindfolded fear.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?