As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

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

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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?

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

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

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.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

Evil is whatever distracts.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

There is no wealth but life.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

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.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Time stays, we go.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

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.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Change alone is unchanging.

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

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

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

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.