An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

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.

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

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

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

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

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

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

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false… In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Truth is what works.

The revealed Word awakened me, but it was the preached Word that saved me, and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

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.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

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