Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Theology is unnecessary.

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

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

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

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.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

The good is the beautiful.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

Beauty without expression is boring.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

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

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

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.

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

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

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

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.