Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

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.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

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

Forever is composed of nows.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

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

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

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

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

Water’s never clumsy.

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

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

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

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

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

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.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

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

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

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

Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.