Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

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.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Stylistically, I love make-up. I love doing my own make-up and stuff, but clothes-wise, I actually didn’t ever really care. Initially the fashion world was more interested in me than the music world, which was strange when I first started singing.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

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?

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

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

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

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

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

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

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.