Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

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.

The only thing that matters is submitting to the will of God.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

A useless life is an early death.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

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

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I didn’t want to submit to the army and then, on the day of judgment, have God say to me, ‚Why did you do that?‘ This life is a trial, and you realize that what you do is going to be written down for Judgment Day.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

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

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

A Christian who does not pray for those who govern is not a good Christian.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and peace.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

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

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.