Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

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.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

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

I don’t have a problem with Hulk Hogan. People say things and do things, and who am I to judge?

The unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

When you give, it comes back to you.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

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

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

The lie is a condition of life.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

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.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

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.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

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

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

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

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

I believe that one key to success is to accept truth, no matter how it’s spoken.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.