An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

We all have the duty to do good.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Every sin is the result of a collaboration.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

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

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.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

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.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.