As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

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

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

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.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

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.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

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.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Character is destiny.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

To be is to do.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

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

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.