All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

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.

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

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

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

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

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

By indignities men come to dignities.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

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.

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.

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

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

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